
Class _i 



^ '^< 



Rnnir R<?M-??^ 



BURKE 



^ %'<!■ 



BY ^^ 



JOHN MORLEY 



6^\ 





:N'EW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 

PBANKLIN SQUARE 



NOTE. 

The present writer published a study on Burke some 
twelve years ago. It was almost entirely critical, and in 
no sense a narrative. The volume now submitted to the 
readers of this Series is biographical rather than critical, 
and not more than about a score of pages have been re- 
produced in it from the earlier book. Three pages (pp. 
211-213) have been inserted from an article on Burke 
contributed by me to the new edition of the ^ncyclopcedia 
Britannica ; and I have to thank Messrs. Black for the 
great courtesy with which they have allowed me to tran- 
scribe the passage here. These borrowings from my for- 
mer self, the reader will perhaps be willing to excuse, on 
the old Greek principle, that a man may once say a thing 
as he would have it said, c\q ^e ovk kvli-yETai — he cannot 

say it twice. 

J.M. 



BURKE. 

CHAPTER I. 

EARLY LIFE, AND FIRST WRITINGS. 

It will soon be a hundred and twenty years since Burke 
first took Ms seat in the House of Commons, and it is 
eighty-five years since his voice ceased to be heard there. 
Since his death, as during his life, opinion as to the place 
to which he is entitled among the eminent men of his 
country has touched every extreme. Tories have extolled 
him as the saviour of Europe. "Whigs have detested him 
as the destroyer of his party. One undiscriminating pan- 
egyrist calls him the most profound and comprehensive of 
political philosophers that has yet existed in the world. 
Another and more distinguished writer insists that he is a 
resplendent and far-seeing rhetorician, rather than a deep 
and subtle thinker. A third tells us that his works can- 
not be too much our study, if we mean either to. under- 
stand or to maintain against its various enemies, open and 
concealed, designing and mistaken, the singular constitu- 
tion of this fortunate island. A fourth, on the contrary, 
declares that it would be hard to find a single leading 
principle or prevailing sentiment in one half of these 
works, to which something extremely adverse cannot be 
1* 



2 BUKKE. [chap. 

found in the other half. A fifth calls him one of the 
greatest men, and, Bacon alone excepted, the greatest 
thinker, who ever devoted himself to the practice of Eng- 
lish politics. Yet, oddly enough, the author of the fifth 
verdict will have it that this great man and great think- 
er was actually out of his mind, when he composed the 
pieces for which he has been most widely admired and 
revered. 

A sufficient interval has now passed to allow all the sed- 
iment of party fanaticism to fall to the bottom. The cir- 
cumstances of the world have since Burke's time under- 
gone variation enough to enable us to judge, from many 
points of view, how far he was the splendid pamphleteer 
of a faction, and how far he was a contributor to the uni- 
versal stock of enduring wisdom. Opinion is slowly, but 
without reaction, settling down to the verdict that Burke 
is one of the abiding names in our history, not because he 
either saved Europe or destroyed the Whig party ; but be- 
cause he added to the permanent considerations of wise 
political thought, and to the maxims of wise practice in 
great affairs, and because he imprints himself upon us with 
a magnificence and elevation of expression, that places him 
among the highest masters of literature, in one of its high- 
est and most comraandinoj senses. Those who have ac- 
quired a love for abstract politics amid the almost mathe- 
matical closeness and precision of Hobbes, the philosophic 
calm of Locke or Mill, or even the majestic and solemn 
fervour of Milton, are revolted by the unrestrained passion 
and the decorated style of Burke. His passion appears 
hopelessly fatal to success in the pursuit of Truth, who 
does not usually reveal herself to followers thus inflamed. 
His ornate style appears fatal to the cautious and pre- 
cise method of statement, suitable to matter which is not 



I.] EARLY LIFE. 3 

known at all unless it is known distinctly. Yet tlie nat- 
ural ardour wliich impelled Burke to clothe his judgments 
in glowing and exaggerated phrases, is one secret of his 
power over us, because it kindles in those who are capable 
of that generous infection a respondent interest and sym- 
pathy. But more than this, the reader is speedily con- 
scious of the precedence in Biirke of the facts of morality 
and conduct, of the many interwoven affinities of human 
affection and historical relation, over the unreal necessi- 
ties of mere abstract logic. Burke's mind was full of the 
matter of great truths, copiously enriched from the foun- 
tains of generous and many-coloured feeling. He thought 
about life as a whole, with all its infirmities and all its 
pomps. With none of the mental exclusiveness of the 
moralist by profession, he fills every page with solemn ref- 
erence and meaning ; with none of the mechanical bustle 
of the common politician, he is everywhere conscious of 
the mastery of laws, institutions, and government over the 
character and happiness of men. Besides thus diffusing a 
strong light over the awful tides of human circumstance, 
Burke has the sacred gift of inspiring men to use a grave 
diligence in caring for high things, and in making their 
lives at once rich and austere. Such a part in literature is 
indeed high. We feel no emotion of revolt when Mackin- 
tosh speaks of Shakespere and Burke in the same breath, 
as being both of them above mere talent. And we do not 
dissent when Macaulay, after reading Burke's works over 
again, exclaims, " How admirable ! The greatest man since 
Milton !" 

The precise date of Burke's birth cannot he stated with 
certainty. All that we can say is that it took place either 
in 1728 or 1729, and it is possible that we may set it 



4 BURKE. [chap. 

down in one or the other year, as we choose to reckon by 
the old or the new style. The best opinion is that he 
was born at Dublin on the 12th of January, 1729 (N.S.). 
His father was a solicitor in good praetice, and is believed 
to have been descended from some Bourkes of county 
Limerick, who held a respectable local position in the time 
of the civil wars. Burke's mother belonged to the Nagle 
family, which had a strong connexion in the county of 
Cork ; they had been among the last adherents of James 
II., and they remained firm Catholics. Mrs. Burke re- 
mained true to the church of her ancestors, and her only 
daughter was brought up in the same faith. Edmund 
Burke and his two brothers, Garret and Richard, were 
bred in the religion of their father ; but Burke never, in" 
after -times, lost a large and generous way of thinking 
about the more ancient creed of his mother and his uncles. 
In 1741 he was sent to school at Ballitore, a village 
some thirty miles away from Dublin, where Abraham 
Shackleton, a Quaker from Yorkshire, had established him- 
self fifteen years before, and had earned a wide reputation 
as a successful teacher and a good man. According to 
Burke, he richly deserved this high character. It was to 
Abraham Shackleton that he always professed to owe 
whatever gain had come to him from education. If I am 
anything, he said many years afterwards, it is the education 
I had there that has made me so. His master's skill as a 
teacher did not impress him more than the example which 
was every day set before him of uprightness and simplici- 
ty of heart. Thirty years later, when Burke had the news 
of Shackleton's death (l77l), "1 had a true honour and 
affection," he wrote, " for that excellent man. I feel 
something like a satisfaction in the midst of my concern, 
that I was fortunate enough to have him once under my 



I.] EARLY LIFE. . 5 

roof before his departure." No man has ever had a deep- 
er or more tender reverence than Burke for homely good- 
ness, simple purity, and all the pieties of life ; it may well 
be that this natural predisposition of all characters at once 
so genial and so serious as his, was finally stamped in him 
by his first schoolmaster. It is true that he was only two 
years at Ballitore, but two years at that plastic time often 
build up habits in the mind that all the rest of a life is 
unable to pull down. 

In 1743 Burke became a student of Trinity College, 
Dublin, and he remained there until 1748, when he took 
his Bachelor's degree. These five years do not appear to 
have been spent in strenuous industry in the beaten paths 
of academic routine. Like so many other men of great 
gifts, Burke in his youth was desultory and excursive. He 
roamed at large over the varied heights that tempt our cu- 
riosity, as the dawn of intelligence first lights them up one 
after another with bewitching visions and illusive magic. 
"All my studies," Burke wrote in 1746, when he was in 
the midst of them, " have rather proceeded from sallies of 
passion, than from the preference of sound reason ; and, 
like all other natural appetites, have been very violent for 
a season, and very soon cooled, and quite absorbed in the 
succeeding. I have often thought it a humorous consid- 
eration to observe and sum up all the madness of this kind 
I have fallen into this two years past. First, I was greatly 
taken with natural philosophy ; which, while I should have 
given my mind to logic, employed me incessantly. This I 
call lay furor mathematicus. But this worked off as soon 
as I began to read it in the college, as men by repletion 
cast off their stomachs all they have eaten. Then I turned 
back to logic and metaphysics. Here I remained a good 
while, and with much pleasure, and this was mj furor logi- 



6 BUKKE. [chap. 

cus, a disease very common in the days of ignorance, and 
very uncommon in these enlightened times. Next suc- 
ceeded the furor historicus, which also had its day, but 
is now no more, being entirely absorbed in the furor 
poeticusy 

This is from one of Burke's letters to Richard Shackle- 
ton, the son of his schoolmaster, with whom he had formed 
one of those close friendships that fill the life of generous 
youth, as ambition fills an energetic manhood. Many tears 
were shed when the two boys parted at Ballitore, and they 
kept up their intimacy by a steady correspondence. They 
discuss the everlasting dispute as to the ultimate fate of 
those who never heard the saving name of Christ. They 
send one another copies of verses, and Burke prays for 
Shackleton's judgment on an invocation of his new poem, 
to beauteous nymphs who haunt the dusky wood, which 
hangs recumbent o'er the crystal flood. Burke is warned 
by Shackleton to endeavour to live according to the rules 
of the Gospel, and he humbly accepts the good advice, 
with the deprecatory plea that in a town it is difficult to 
sit down to think seriously : it is easier, he says, to follow 
the rules of the Gospel in the country, than at Trinity Col- 
lege, Dublin. In the region of profaner things the two 
friends canvass the comparative worth of Sallust and of 
Tully's Epistles. Burke holds for the historian, who has, 
he thinks, a fine, easy, diversified narrative, mixed with re- 
flection, moral and political, neither very trite nor obvious, 
nor out of the way and abstract, and this is the true beauty 
of historical observation. 

Some pages of verse describe to Shackleton how his 
friend passes the day, but the reader will perhaps be con- 
tent to learn in humbler prose that Burke rose with the 
dawn, and strode forth into the country through fragrant 



I.] EARLY LIFE. 1 

gardens and the pride of May, until want of breakfast 
drove liim back unwillingly to the town, where amid lect- 
ures and books his heart incessantly turned to the river 
and the fir woods of Ballitore. In the evening he again 
turned his back on the city, taking his way " where Liffey 
rolls her dead dogs to the sea," along to the wall on the 
shore, whence he delighted to see the sun sink into the 
waters, gilding ocean, ships, and city as it vanished. 
Alas, it was beneath the dignity of verse to tell us what 
we should most gladly have known. For, 

•' The muse nor can, nor will declare, 
What is my work, and what my studies there." 

What serious nourishment Burke was laying in for his 
understanding, we cannot learn from any other source. 
He describes himself as spending three hours almost every 
day in the public library. " The best way in the world," 
he adds oddly enough, " of killing thought." I have 
read some history, he says, and among other pieces of 
history, " I am endeavouring to get a little into the ac- 
counts of this, our own poor country " — a pathetic ex- 
pression, which represents Burke's perpetual mood, as long 
as he lived, of affectionate pity for his native land. Of 
the eminent Irishmen whose names adorn the annals of 
Trinity College in the eighteenth century, Burke was only 
contemporary at the University with one, the luckless 
•sizar who in the fulness of time wrote the Vicar of Wake- 
field. There is no evidence that at this time he and Gold- 
smith were acquainted with one another. Flood had gone 
to Oxford some time before. The one or two companions 
whom Burke mentions in his letters are only shadows of 
names. The mighty Swift died in 1745, but there is 
nothing of Burke's upon the event. In the same year 



8 BUEKE. [chap. 

came the Pretender's invasion, and Burke spoke of those 
who had taken part in it in the same generous spirit 
that he always showed to the partisans of lost historic 
causes. 

Of his own family Burke says little, save that in 1'746 
his mother had a dangerous illness. In all my life, he 
writes to his friend, I never found so heavy a grief, nor 
really did I well know what it was before. Burke's father 
is said to have been a man of angry and irritable temper, 
and their disagreements were frequent. This unhappy 
circumstance made the time for parting not unwelcome. 
In 1747 Burke's name had been entered at the Middle 
Temple, and after taking his degree, he prepared to go 
to England to pursue the ordinary course of a lawyer's 
studies. He arrived in London in the early part of 
1750. 

A period of nine years followed, in which the circum- 
stances of Burke's life are enveloped in nearly complete 
obscurity. He seems to have kept his terms in the regu- 
lar way at the Temple, and from the mastery of legal prin- 
ciples and methods which he afterwards showed in some 
important transactions, we might infer that he did more 
to qualify himself for practice than merely dine in the 
hall of his Inn. For law, alike as a profession and an in- 
strument of mental discipline, he had always the profound 
respect that it so amply deserves, though he saw that it 
was not without drawbacks of its own. The law, he 
said, in his fine description of George Grenville, in words 
that all who think about schemes of education ought to 
ponder, " is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest 
of human sciences ; a science which does more to quicken 
and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds 
of learning put together ; but it is not apt, except in 



I.] EARLY LIFE. 9 

persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the 
mind exactly in the same proportion."^ Burke was 
never called to the bar, and the circumstance that, about 
the time when he ought to have been looking for his 
first guinea, he published a couple of books which had 
as little as possible to do with either law or equity, is a 
tolerably sure sign that he had followed the same desul- 
tory courses at the Temple as heTiad followed at Trinity 
College. We have only to tell over again a very old 
story. The vague attractions of literature prevailed over 
the duty of taking up a serious profession. His father, 
who had set his heart on having a son in the rank of a 
barrister, was first suspicious, then extremely indignant, 
and at last he withdrew his son's allowance, or else re- 
duced it so low that the recipient could not possibly liv^e 
upon it. This catastrophe took place some time in 1755 
— a year of note in the history of Utei'ature, as the date 
of the publication of Johnson's Dictionary. It was upon 
literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most 
dangerous of professions, that Burke, like so many hun- 
dreds of smaller men before and since, now threw himself 
for a livelihood. 

Of the details of the struggle we know very little. 
Burke was not fond in after-life of talking about his ear- 
lier days, not because he had any false shame about the 
straits and hard shifts of youthful neediness, but because 
he was endowed with a certain inborn stateliness of nature, 
which made him unwilling to waste thoughts on the less 
dignified parts of life. This is no unqualified virtue, and 
Burke might have escaped some wearisome frets and em- 
barrassments in his existence, if he had been capable of 
letting the detail of the day lie more heavily upon him. 
' American Taxation. 



10 BURKE. [chap. 

So far as it goes, however, it is a sign of mental health 
that a man should he ahle to cast hehind him the barren 
memories of bye -gone squalor. We may be sure that 
whatever were the external ordeals of his apprenticeship 
in the slippery craft of the literary adventurer, Burke nev- 
er failed in keeping for his constant companions generous 
ambitions and high thoughts. He appears to have fre- 
quented the debating clubs in Fleet Street and the Piazza 
of Covent Garden, and he showed the common taste of 
his time for the theatre. He was much of a wanderer, 
partly from the natural desire of restless youth to see the 
world, and partly because his health was weak. In after- 
life he was a man of great strength, capable not only of 
bearing the strain of prolonged application to books and 
papers in the solitude of his library, but of bearing it at 
the same time with the distracting combination of active 
business among men. At the date of which we are speak- 
ino-, he used to seek a milder air at Bristol, or in Mon- 
mouthshire, or Wiltshire. He passed the summer in re- 
tired country villages, reading and writing with desultory 
industry, in company with William Burke, a namesake but 
perhaps no kinsman. It would be interesting to know 
the plan and scope of his studies. We are practically re- 
duced to conjecture. In a letter of counsel to his son in 
after-years, he gave him a weighty piece of advice, which 
is pretty plainly the key to the reality and fruitf ulness of 
his own knowledge. ''^Reading ^'' he said, '•''and much 
reading is good. But the power of diversifying the matter 
infinitely in your oion mind, and of applying it to every 
occasion that arises, is far better; so don't suppress the vi- 
vida vis." We have no more of Burke's doings than ob- 
scure and tantalizing glimpses, tantalizing, because he was 
then at the age when character usually either fritters itself 



I.] ' EAKLY LIFE. 11 

away, or grows strong on the inward sustenance of solid 
and resolute aspirations. Writing from Battersea to his 
old comrade, Shackleton, in 1757, he begins with an apol- 
ogy for a long silence which seems to have continued from 
months to years. " I have broken all rules ; I have neg- 
lected all decorums ; everything except that I have never 
forgot a friend, whose good head and heart have made me 
esteem and love him. What appearance there may have 
been of neglect, arises from my manner of life ; chequered 
with various designs ; sometimes in London, sometimes in 
remote parts of the country ; sometimes in France, and 
shortly, please God, to be in America." 

One of the hundred inscrutable rumours that hovered 
about Burke's name was, that he at one time actually did 
visit America. This was just as untrue as that he -became 
a convert to the Catholic faith ; or that he was the lover 
of Peg Woffington ; or that he contested Adam Smith's 
chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow along with Hume, 
and that both Burke and Hume were rejected in favour 
of some fortunate Mr. James Clow. They are all alike 
unfounded. But the same letter informs Shackleton of 
a circumstance more real and more important than any 
of these, though its details are only doubtfully known. 
Burke had married — when and where, we cannot tell. 
Probably the marriage took place in the winter of 1756. 
His wife was the daughter of Dr. Nugent, an Irish physi- 
cian once settled at Bath. One story is that Burke con- 
sulted him in one of his visits to the west of England, and 
fell in love with his daughter. Another version makes 
Burke consult him after Dr. Nugent had removed to Lon- 
don ; and tells how the kindly physician, considering that 
the noise and bustle of chambers over a shop must hinder 
his patient's recovery, offered him rooms in his own house. 



12 BURKE. [chap. 

However these things may have been, all the evidence 
shows Burke to have been fortunate in the choice or acci- 
dent that bestowed upon him his wife. Mrs. Burke, like 
her father, was, up to the time of her marriage, a Catholic. 
Good judges belonging to her own sex describe her as 
gentle, quiet, soft in her manners, and well-bred. She had 
the qualities which best fitted and disposed her to soothe 
the vehemence and irritability of her companion. Though 
she afterwards conformed to the religion of her husband, 
it was no insignificant coincidence that in two of the dear- 
est relations of his life the atmosphere of Catholicism was 
thus poured round the great preacher of the crusade 
against the Revolution. 

About the time of his marriage, Burke made his first 
appearance as an author. It was in 1756 that he pub- 
lished A Vindication of Natural Society, and the more 
important essay, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin 
of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful. The latter of 
them had certainly been written a long time before, and 
there is even a traditional legend that Burke wrote it when 
he was only nineteen years old. Both of these perform- 
ances have in different degrees a historic meaning, but 
neither of them would have survived to our own day un- 
less they had been associated with a name of power. A 
few words will suffice to do justice to them here. And 
first as to the Vindication of Natural Society. Its alterna- 
tive title was, A View of the Miseries and Uvils arising to 
Mankind from every Species of Civil Society, in a Letter 

to Lord , hy a late Nohle Writer. Bolingbroke had 

died in 1751, and in 1754 his philosophical works were 
posthumously given to the world by David Mallet, Dr. 
Johnson's beggarly Scotchman, to whom Bolingbroke had 
left half-a-crown in his will, for firing off a blunderbuss 



I.] FIRST WRITINGS. 13 

whicli lie was afraid to fire off himself. The world of let- 
ters had been keenly excited about Bolingbroke. His busy 
and chequered career, his friendship with the great wits of 
the previous generation, his splendid style, his bold opin- 
ions, made him a dazzling figure. This was the late Noble 
Writer whose opinions Burke intended to ridicule, by re- 
ducing them to an absurdity in an exaggeration of Boling- 
broke's own manner. As it happened, the public did not 
readily perceive either the exaggeration in the manner, or 
the satire in the matter. Excellent judges of style made 
sure that the writing was really Bolingbroke's, and serious 
critics of philosophy never doubted that the writer, who- 
ever he was, meant all that he said. We can hardly 
help agreeing with Godwin, when he says that in Burke's 
treatise the evils of existing political institutions, which 
had been described by Locke, are set forth more at large, 
with incomparable force of reasoning and lustre of elo- 
quence, though the declared intention of the writer was to 
show that such evils ought to be considered merely trivial. 
Years afterwards, Boswell asked Johnson whether an im- 
prudent publication by a certain friend of his at an early 
period of his life, would be likely to hurt him ? " No, 
sir," replied the sage ; " not much ; it might perhaps be 
mentioned at an election." It is significant that in 1765, 
when Burke saw his chance of a seat in Parliament, he 
thought it worth while to print a second edition of his 
Vindication, with a preface to assure his readers that the 
design of it was ironical. It has been remarked as a very 
extraordinary circumstance that an author who had the 
greatest fame of any man of his day as the master of a 
superb style, for this was indeed Bolingbroke's position, 
should have been imitated to such perfection by a mere 
novice, that accomplished critics like Chesterfield and War- 



14 BURKE. [chap. 

burton should have mistaken the copy for a first-rate orig- 
inal. It is, however, to be remembered that the very bold- 
ness and sweeping rapidity of Bolingbroke's prose render- 
ed it more fit for imitation, than if its merits had been 
those of delicacy or subtlety ; and we must remember that 
the imitator was no pygmy, but himself one of the giants. 
What is certain is that the study of Bolingbroke which 
preceded this excellent imitation left a permanent mark, 
and traces of Bolingbroke were never effaced from the 
style of Burke. 

The point of the Vindication is simple enough. It is 
to show that the same instruments which Bolingbroke had 
employed in favour of natural against revealed religion, - 
could be employed with equal success in favour of natural 
as against, what Burke calls, artificial society. " Show 
me," cries the writer, " an absurdity in religion, and I will 
undertake to show you a hundred for one in political laws 
and institutions. ... If , after all, you should confess all 
these things yet plead the necessity of political institutions, 
weak and wicked as they are, I can argue with equal, per- 
haps superior force, concerning the necessity of artificial re- 
ligion ; and every step you advance in your argument, you 
add a strength to mine. So that, if we are resolved to sub- 
mit our reason and our liberty to civil usurpation, we have 
nothing to do but to conform as quietly as we can to the 
vulgar notions which are connected with this, and take up 
the theology of the vulgar as well as their politics. But 
if we think this necessity rather imaginary than real, we 
should renounce their dreams of society, together with 
their visions of religion, and vindicate ourselves into per- 
fect liberty." 

The most interesting fact about this spirited perform- 
ance is, that it is a satirical literary handling of the great 



I.] FIRST WRITINGS. 15 

proposition whicli Burke enforced, witli all the thunder 
and lurid effulgence of his most passionate rhetoric, five- 
and-thirty years later. This proposition is that the world 
would fall into ruin, " if the practice of all moral duties, 
and the foundations of society, rested upon having their 
reasons made clear and demonstrative to every individual." 
The satire is intended for an illustration of what with 
a Burke was the cardinal truth for men, namely, that if you 
f encourage every individual to let the imagination loose 
I upon all subjects, without any restraint from a sense of 
\ his own weakness, and his subordinate rank in the long 
/ scheme of things, then tliere is nothing of all that the 
opinion of ages has agreed to regard as excellent and ven- 
erable, whicli would not be exposed to destruction at the 
hands of rationalistic criticism. This was Burke's most 

(fundamental and unswerving conviction from the first 
piece that he wrote down to the last, and down to the last 
hour of his existence. 

It is a coincidence worth noticing that only two years 
before the appearance of the Vindication^ Eousseau had 
published the second of the two memorable Discourses in 
which he insisted with serious eloquence on that which 
Burke treats as a triumph of irony. He believed, and 
many thousands of Frenchmen came to a speculative agree- 
ment with him, that artificial society had marked a de- 
cline in the felicity of man, and there are passages in the 
Discourse in which he demonstrates this, that are easily 
interchangeable with passages in the Vindication. Who 
would undertake to tell us from internal evidence whether 
the following page, with its sombre glow, is an extract 
from Burke, or an extract from the book which Rousseau 
begins by the sentence that man is born free, yet is he 
everywhere in chains ? 



16 BURKE. [chap. 

There are in Great Britain upwards of a hundred thousand people 
employed in lead, tin, iron, copper, and coal mines ; these unhappy 
wretches scarce ever see the light of the sun ; they are buried in the 
bowels of the earth ; there they work at a severe and dismal task, 
without the least prospect of being delivered from it ; they subsist 
upon the coarsest and worst sort of fare ; they have their health 
miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually 
confined in the close vapour of these malignant minerals. A hundred 
thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffo- 
cating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery, necessary in refin- 
ing and managing the products of those mines. If any man inform- 
ed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned 
to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy sufferers, 
and how great would be our just indignation against those who in- 
flicted so cruel and ignominious a punishment ! . . . But this number, 
considerable as it is, and the slavery, with all its baseness and hor- 
ror, which we have at home, is nothing to what the rest of the world 
affords of the same nature. Millions daily bathed in the poisonous 
damps and destructive effluvia of lead, silver, copper, and arsenic, to 
say nothing of those other employments, those stations of wretched- 
ness and contempt, in which civil society has placed the numerous 
enfatis perdus of her army. Would any rational man submit to one 
of the most tolerable of these drudgeries, for all the artificial enjoy- 
ments which policy has made to result from them ? . . . Indeed, the 
blindness of one part of mankind co-operating with the frenzy and 
villany of the other, has been the real builder of this respectable 
fabric of political society: and as the blindness of mankind has 
caused their slavery, in return their state of slavery is made a pre- 
tence for continuing them in a state of blindness ; for the politician 
will tell you gravely, that their life of servitude disqualifies the 
greater part of the race of man for a search of truth, and supplies 
them with no other than mean and insufficient ideas. This is but 
too true ; and this is one of the reasons for which I blame such in- 
stitutions. 

From the very beginning, therefore, Burte was drawn 
to the deepest of all the currents in the thought of the 
eighteenth century. Johnson and Goldsmith continued 



I.] FIRST WRITINGS. 11 

the traditions of social and polite literature which had been 
established by the Queen Anne men. Warburton and a 
whole host of apologists carried on the battle against de- 
ism and infidelity. Hume, after furnishing the arsenal of 
scepticism with a new array of deadlier engines and more 
abundant ammunition, had betaken himself placidly to the 
composition of history. What is remarkable in Burke's 
first performance is his discernment of the important fact, 
that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of 
philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of the- 
ology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the 
whole fabric of civil society itself. In France, as all stu- 
dents of its speculative history are agreed, there came a 
time in the eighteenth century when theological contro- 
versy was turned into political controversy. Innovators 
left the question about the truth of Christianity, and bus- 
ied themselves with questions about the ends and means 
of governments. The appearance of Burke's Vindication 
of Natural Society coincides in time with the beginning 
of this important transformation. Burke foresaw from 
the first what, if rationalism were allowed to run an unim- 
peded course, would be the really great business of the sec- 
ond half of his century. 

If in his first book Burke showed how alive he was to 
the profound movement of the time, in the second he dealt 
with one of the most serious of its more superficial inter- 
ests. The essay on the Sublime and Beautiful fell in with 
a set of topics, on which the curiosity of the better minds 
of the age, alike in France, England, and Germany, was 
fully stirred. In England the essay has been ordinarily 
slighted; it has perhaps been overshadowed by its author's 
fame in weightier matters. The nearest approach to a full 
and serious treatment of its main positions is to be found 
2 



18 BURKE. [chap. 

in Dugald Stewart's lectures. The great rhetorical art-critic 
of our own day refers to it in words of disparagement, and 
in truth it has none of the flummery of modern criticism. 
It is a piece of hard thinking, and it has the distinction 
of having interested and stimulated Lessing, the author of 
Laokoon (1766), by far the most definitely valuable of all 
the contributions to aesthetic thought in an age which 
was not poor in them. Lessing was so struck with the 
Inquiry that he set about a translation of it, and the cor- 
respondence between him and Moses Mendelssohn on the 
questions which Burke had raised, contains the germs of 
the doctrine as to poetry and painting which Laokoon af- 
terwards made so famous. Its influence on Lessing and on 
Kant was such as to justify the German historian of the 
literature of the century in bestowing on it the coveted 
epithet of epoch-making. 

The book is full of crudities. We feel the worse side 
of the eighteenth century when Burke tells us that a thirst 
for Variety in architecture is sure to leave very little true 
taste; or that an air of robustness and strength is very 
prejudicial to beauty ; or that sad fuscous colours are in- 
dispensable for sublimity. Many of the sections, again, 
are little more than expanded definitions from the diction- 
ary. Any tiro may now be shocked at such a proposition 
as that beaiity acts by relaxing the solids of the whole sys- 
tem. But at least one signal merit remains to the Inquiry. 
It was a vigorous enlargement of the principle, which Ad- 
dison had not long before timidly illustrated, that critics 
of art seek its principles in the wrong place, so long as 
they limit their search to poems, pictures, engravings, stat- 
ues, and buildings, instead of first arranging the sentiments 
and faculties in man to which art makes its appeal. Ad- 
dison's treatment was slight, and merely literary ; Burke 



I.] FIRST WRITINGS. 19 

dealt boldly with his subject on the base of the most sci- 
entific psychology that was then within his reach. To ap- 
proach it on the psychological side at all, was to make a 
distinct and remarkable advance in the method of the in- 
quiry which he had taken in hand. 



CHAPTER 11. 

IN IRELAND PARLIAMENT BEACONSFIELD. 

Burke was thirty years old before he approached even the 
threshold of the arena in which he was destined to be so 
great a figure. He had made a mark in literature, and it 
was to literature rather than to public affairs that his am- 
bition turned. He had naturally become acquainted with 
the brother authors who haunted the coffee-houses in Fleet ' 
Street ; and Burke, along with his father-in-law, Dr. Nu- 
gent, was one of the first members of the immortal club 
where Johnson did conversational battle with all comers. 
We shall, in a later chapter, have something to say on 
Burke's friendships with the followers of his first profes- 
sion, and on the active sympathy with which he helped 
those who were struggling into authorship. Meanwhile, 
the fragments that remain of his own attempts in this 
direction are no considerable contributions. His Hints 
for an Essay on the Drama are jejune and infertile, when 
compared with the vigorous and original thought of Dide- 
rot and Lessing at about the same period. He wrote an 
Account of the European Settlements in America. His 
Abridgment of the History of England comes down no 
further than to the reign of John. A much more impor- 
tant undertaking than his history of the past, was his de- 
sign for a yearly chronicle of the present. The Annual 
Register began to appear in 1759. Dodsley, the bookseller 



CHAP, n.] IRELAND. 21 

of Pall Mall, provided the sinews of war, and be gave Burke 
a hundred pounds a year for Ms survey of the great events 
which were then passing in the world. The scheme was 
probably born of the circumstances of the hour, for this 
was the climax of the Seven Years' War. The clang of 
arms was heard in every quarter of the globe, and in East 
and West new lands were being brought under the domin- 
ion of Great Britain. 

In this exciting crisis of national affairs, Burke began to 
be acquainted with public men. In 1759 he was intro- 
duced, probably by Lord Charlemont, to William Gerard 
Hamilton, who only survives in our memories by his nick- 
name of Single -speech. As a matter of fact, he made 
many speeches in Parliament, and some good ones, but 
none so good as the first, delivered in a debate in 1755, in 
which Pitt, Fox, Grenville, and Murray all took part, and 
were all outshone by the new luminary. But the new 
luminary never shone again with its first brilliance. He 
sought Burke out on the strength of the success of the 
Vmd.ication of Natural Society^ and he seems to have had 
a taste for good company. Horace Walpole describes a 
dinner at his house in the summer of 1761. " There were 
Garrick," he says, " and a young Mr. Burke, who wrote a 
book in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, that is much ad- 
mired. He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his 
authorism yet, and thinks there is nothing so charming as 
writers, and to be one. He will know better one of these 
days." The prophecy came true in time, but it was Burke's 
passion for authorism that eventually led to a rupture with 
his first patron. Hamilton was a man of ability, but self- 
ish and unreasonable. Dr. Leland afterwards described 
him compendiously as a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, canker- 
hearted, envious reptile. 



22 BLKKE. [chap. 

In 1761 Hamilton went to Ireland as secretary to Lord 
Halifax, and Burke accompanied him in some indefinite 
capacity. " The absenteeism of her men of genius," an 
eminent historian has said, " was a worse wrong to Ireland 
than the absenteeism of her landlords. If Edmund Burke 
had remained in the country where Providence had placed 
him, he might have changed the current of its history."^ 
It is at least to be said that Burke was never so absorbed 
in other affairs, as to forget the peculiar interests of his 
native land. We have his own word, and his career does 
not belie it, that in the elation with which he was filled on 
being elected a member of Parliament, what was first and 
uppermost in his thoughts was the hope of being some- 
what useful to the place of his birth and education ; and 
to the last he had in it " a dearness of instinct more than 
he could justify to reason." In fact the affairs of Ireland 
had a most important part in Burke's life at one or two 
critical moments, and this is as convenient a place as we 
are likely to find for describing in a few words what were 
the issues. The brief space can hardly be grudged in an 
account of a great political writer, for Ireland has fur- 
nished the chief ordeal, test, and standard of English 
statesmen. 

Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century was to 
England just what the American colonies would have been, 
if they had contained, besides the European settlers, more 
than twice their number of unenslaved negroes. After the 
suppression of the great rebellion of Tyrconnel by William 
of Orange, nearly the whole of the land was confiscated, 
the peasants were made beggars and outlaws, the Penal 
Laws against the Catholics were enacted and enforced, and 
the grand reign of Protestant Ascendancy began in all its 
* Froude's Ireland, ii. 214. 



il] IRELAND. 23 

vileness and completeness. The Protestants and landlords 
were supreme ; the peasants and the Catholics were pros- 
trate in despair. The Revolution brought about in Ireland 
just the reverse of what it effected in England. Here it 
delivered the body of the nation from the attempted 
supremacy of a small sect. There it made a small sect 
supreme over the body of the nation. " It was, to say the 
truth,-' Burke wrote, " not a revolution but a conquest," 
and the policy of conquest was treated as the just and 
normal system of government. The last conquest of Eng- 
land was in the eleventh century. The last conquest of 
Ireland was at the very end of the seventeenth. 

Sixty years after these events, when Burke revisited Ire- 
land, some important changes had taken place. The Eng- 
lish settlers of the beginning of the century had formed 
an Irish interest. They had become Anglo-Irish, just as 
the colonists still further west had formed a colonial inter- 
est and become Anglo-American. The same conduct on the 
part of the mother country promoted the growth of these 
hostile interests in both cases. The commercial policy 
pursued by England towards America was identical with 
that pursued towards Ireland. The industry of the Anglo- 
Irish traders was restricted, their commerce and even their 
production fettered, their prosperity checked, for the bene- 
fit of the merchants of Manchester and Bristol. Crescit 
Roma Albce minis. "The bulk of the people," said Stone, 
the Primate, " are not regularly either lodged, clothed, or 
fed ; and those things which in England are called neces- 
saries of life, are to us only accidents, and we can, and in 
many places do, subsist without them." On the other 
hand, the peasantry had gradually taken heart to resent 
their spoliation and attempted extirpation, and in 1761 
their misery under the exactions of landlords and a church 



24 BUKKE. - [chap. 

which tried to spread Christianity by the brotherly agency 
of the tithe-proctor, gave birth to Whiteboyism — a terrible 
spectre, which, under various names and with various mod- 
ifications, has ridden Ireland down to our own time. 

Burke saw the Protestant traders of the dependency the 
victims of the colonial and commercial system ; the Catho- 
lic land-owners legally dispossessed by the operation of the 
penal laws ; the Catholic peasantry deeply penetrated with 
an insurgent and vindictive spirit; and the imperial gov- 
ernment standing very much aloof, and leaving the coun- 
try to the tender mercies of the Undertakers and some 
Protestant churchmen. The Anglo-Irish were bitterly dis- 
contented with the mother country ; and the Catholic na- 
tive Irish were regarded by their Protestant oppressors 
with exactly that combination of intense contempt and 
loathing, and intense rage and terror, which their American 
counterpart would have divided between the Negro and 
the Eed Indian. To the Anglo-Irish the native peasant 
was as odious as the first, and as terrible as the second. 
Even at the close of the century Burke could declare that 
the various descriptions of the people were kept as much 
apart, as if they were not only separate nations, but sep- 
arate species. There were thousands, he says, who had 
never talked to a Eoman Catholic in their whole lives, un- 
less they happened to talk to a gardener's workman, or 
some other labourer of the second or third order, while a 
little time before this they were so averse to have them 
near their persons, that they would not employ even those 
who could never find their way beyond the stables. Ches- 
terfield, a thoroughly impartial and just observer, said in 
1764 that the poor people in Ireland were used worse than 
negroes by their masters and the middlemen. We should 
never forget that in the transactions with the English gov- 



n.] IRELAND. 25 

eminent during tlie eigliteenth century, the people con- 
cerned were not the Irish, but the Anglo-Irish, the colonists 
of 1691. They were an aristocracy, as Adam Smith said 
of them, not founded in the natural and respectable dis- 
tinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of 
all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices 
— distinctions which, more than any other, animate both 
the insolence of the oppressors, and the hatred and indig- 
nation of the oppressed. 

The directions in which Irish improvement would move, 
were clear from the middle of the century to men with 
much less foresight than Burke had. The removal of all 
commercial restrictions, either by Independence or Union, 
on the one hand ; and the gradual emancipation of the 
Catholics, on the other ; were the two processes to which 
every consideration of good government manifestly point- 
ed. The first proved a much shorter and simpler process 
than the second. To the first the only obstacle was the 
blindness and selfishness of the English merchants. The 
second had to overcome the virulent opposition of the ty- 
rannical Protestant faction in Ireland, and the disgrace- 
ful but deep-rooted antipathies of the English nation. 
The history of the relation between the mother country 
and her dependency during Burke's life, may be charac- 
terized as a commercial and legislative struggle between 
the imperial government and the Anglo-Irish interest, in 
which each side for its own convenience, as the turn served, 
drew support from the Catholic majority. 

A Whiteboy outbreak, attended by the usual circum- 
stances of disorder and violence, took place while Burke 
was in Ireland. It suited the interests of faction to repre- 
sent these commotions as the symptoms of a deliberate 
rebellion. The malcontents were represented as carrying 
2* 



26 BURKE. [chap. 

on treasonable correspondence, sometimes with Spain and 
sometimes with France; they were accused of receiving 
money and arms from their foreign sympathizers, and of 
aiming at throwing off the English rule. ^ Burke says that 
he had means and the desire of informino; himself to the 
bottom upon the matter, and he came strongly to the con- 
clusion that this was not a true view of what had happen- 
ed. What had happened was due, he thought, to no plot, 
but to superficial and fortuitous circumstances. He con- 
sequently did not shrink from describing it as criminal, 
that the king's Catholic subjects in Ireland should have 
been subjected, on no good grounds, to harassing persecu- 
tion, and that numbers of them should have been ruined 
in fortune, imprisoned, tried, and capitally executed for a 
rebellion which was no rebellion at all. The episode is 
only important as illustrating the strong and manly tem- 
per in which Burke, unlike too many of his countrymen 
with fortunes to make by English favour, uniformly con- 
sidered the circumstances of his country. It was not un- 
til a later time that he had an opportunity of acting con- 
spicuously on her behalf, but whatever influence he came 
to acquire with his party was unflinchingly used against 
the cruelty of English prejudice. 

Burke appears to have remained in Ireland for two years 
(1761-3). In 1763 Hamilton, who had found him an 
invaluable auxiliary, procured for him, principally with 
the aid of the Primate Stone, a pension of three hundred 
pounds a year from the Irish Treasury. In thanking him 
for this service, Burke proceeded to bargain that the obli- 
gation should not bind him to give to his patron the whole 
of his time. He insisted on being left with a discreet lib- 
erty to continue a little work which he had as a rent- 
charge upon his thoughts. Whatever advantages he had 



II.] SEPARATION FROM HAMILTON. 27 

acquired, he says, had been due to literary reputation, and 
he could only hope for a continuance of such advantages 
on condition of doing something to keep the same reputa- 
tion alive. What this literary design was we do not know 
with certainty. It is believed to have been a history of 
England, of which, as I have said, a fragment remains. 
Whatever the work may have been, it was an offence to 
Hamilton. With an irrational stubbornness that may well 
astound us when we think of the noble genius that he thus 
wished to confine to paltry personal duties, he persisted 
that Burke should bind himself to his service for life, and 
to the exclusion of other interests. " To circumscribe my 
hopes," cried Burke, " to give up even the possibility of 
liberty, to annihilate myself for ever!" He threw up the 
pension, which he had held for two years, and declined all 
further connexion with Hamilton, whom he roundly de- 
scribed as an infamous scoundrel. " Six of the best years 
of my life he took me from every pursuit of my literary 
reputation, or of improvement of my fortune. ... In all 
this time you may easily conceive how much I felt at see- 
ing myself left behind by almost all of my contemporaries. 
There never was a season more favourable for any man 
who chose to enter into the career of public life ; and I 
think I am not guilty of ostentation in supposing my own 
moral character, and my industry, my friends and con- 
nexions, when Mr. Hamilton first sought ray acquaintance, 
were not at all inferior to those of several whose fortune 
is at this day upon a very different footing from mine." 

It was not long before a more important opening offered 
itself, which speedily brought Burke into the main stream 
of public life. In the summer of 1765 a change of min- 
istry took place. It was the third since the king's acces- 
sion five years ago. First, Pitt had been disgraced, and 



28 BURKE. [chap. 

the old Duke of Newcastle dismissed. Then Bute came 
into power, but Bute quailed before the storm of calumny 
and hate which his Scotch nationality, and the supposed 
source of his power over the king, had raised in every 
town in England. After Lord Bute, George Grenville 
undertook the Government. Before he had been many 
months in office, he had sown the seeds of war in the col- 
onies, wearied parliament, and disgusted the king. In 
June, 1765, Grenville was dismissed. With profound re- 
luctance the king had no other choice than to summon 
Lord Rockingham, and Lord Rockingham, in a happy mo- 
ment for himself and his party, was induced to offer Burke 
a post as his private secretary. A government by country 
gentlemen is too apt to be a government of ignorance, 
and Lord Rockingham was without either experience or 
knowledge. He felt, or friends felt for him, the advantage 
of having at his side a man who was chiefly known as an 
author in the service of Dodsley, and as having conducted 
the Annual Register with great ability, but who even then 
was widely spoken of as nothing less than an encyclopaedia 
of political knowledge. 

It is commonly believed that Burke was commended to 
Lord Rockingham by William Fitzherbert. Fitzherbert 
was President of the Board of Trade in the new govern- 
ment, but he is more likely to be remembered as Dr. John- 
son's famous example of the truth of the observation, that 
a man will please more upon the whole by negative quali- 
ties than by positive, because he was the most acceptable 
man in London, and yet overpowered nobody by the supe- 
riority of his talents, made no man think worse of himself 
by being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oblige 
you to hear much from him, and did not oppose what 
you said. Besides Fitzherbert's influence, we have it on 



il] introduction to lord ROCKINGHAM. 29 

Burke's own authority that his promotion was partly due 
to that mysterious person, William Burke, who was at the 
same time appointed an iinder-secretary of state. There 
must have been unpleasant rumours afloat as to the Burke 
connexion, and we shall presently consider w^hat they were 
worth. Meanwhile, it is enough to say that the old Duke 
of Newcastle hurried to the new premier, and told him 
the appointment would never do : that the new secretary 
was not only an Irish adventurer, which was true, but that 
he was an Irish papist, which was not true ; that he was 
a Jesuit, that he was a spy from Saint Omer's, and that 
his real name was O'Bourke. Lord Rockingham behaved 
like a man of sense and honour, sent for Burke, and re- 
peated to him what he had heard. Burke warmly de- 
nounced the truthlessness of the Duke's tattle : he insisted 
that the reports which his chief had heard would prob- 
ably, even unknown to himself, create in his mind such 
suspicions as would stand in the way of a thorough con- 
fidence. No earthly consideration, he said, should induce 
him to continue in relations with a man whose trust in 
him was not entire ; and he pressed his resignation. To 
this Lord Rockingham would not consent, and from that 
time until his death, seventeen years afterwards, the rela- 
tions between them were those of loyal and honourable 
service on the one hand, and generous and appreciative 
friendship on the other. Six-and-twenty years afterwards 
(1791) Burke remembered the month in which he had 
first become connected with a man whose memory, he said, 
will ever be precious to Englishmen of all parties, as long 
as the ideas of honour and virtue, public and private, are 
understood and cherished in this nation. 

The Rockingham ministry remained in office for a year 
and twenty days (1765-6). About the middle of this 



30 BURKE. [chap. 

term (Dec. 26, 1765), Burke was returned to Parliament 
for the borougli of Wendover, by the influence of Lord 
Verney, who owned it, and who also returned "William 
Burke for another borough. Lord Verney was an Irish 
peer, with large property in Buckinghamshire ; he now 
represented that county in Parliament. It was William 
Burke's influence with Lord Verney that procured for his 
namesake the seat at Wendover. Burke made his first 
speech in the House of Commons a few days after the 
opening of the session of 1766 (Jan. 27), and was honour- 
ed by a compliment from Pitt, still the Great Commoner. 
A week later he spoke again on the same momentous 
theme, the complaints of the American colonists, and his 
success was so marked that good judges predicted, in the 
stiff phraseology of the time, that he would soon add the 
palm of the orator to the laurel of the writer and the phi- 
losopher. The friendly Dr. Johnson wrote to Langton, 
that Burke had gained more reputation than any man at 
his first appearance had ever gained before. The session 
was a great triumph to the new member, but it brought 
neither strength nor popularity to the administration. At 
the end of it, the king dismissed them, and the Chatham 
government was formed ; that strange combination which 
has been made famous by Burke's description of it, as a 
piece of joinery so crossly indented and whimsically dove- 
tailed, such a piece of diversified mosaic, such a tesselated 
pavement without cement, that it was indeed a very curi- 
ous show, but utterly unsafe to touch and unsure to stand 
upon. There was no obvious reason why Burke should 
not have joined the new ministry. The change was at 
first one of persons, rather than of principles or of meas- 
ures. To put himself, as Burke afterwards said, out of 
the way of the negotiations which were then being carried 



11.] IN PARLIAMENT. 31 

on very eagerly and througli many channels with the Earl 
of Chatham, he went to Ireland very soon after the change 
of ministry. He was free from party engagements, and 
more than this, he was free at the express desire of his 
friends ; for on the very day of his return, the Marquis of 
Rockingham wished him to accept office under the new 
svstem. Burke " believes he mio-ht have had such a situ- 
ation, but he cheerfully took his fate with his party." In 
a short time he rendered his party the first of a long series 
of splendid literary services by writing his Observations on 
the Present State of the Nation (1769). It was a reply 
to a pamphlet by George Grenville, in which the disap- 
pointed minister accused his successors of ruining the coun- 
try. Burke, in answering the charge, showed a grasp of 
commercial and fiscal details at least equal to that of Gren- 
ville himself, then considered the first man of his time in 
dealing with the national trade and resources. To this 
easy mastery of the special facts of the discussion, Burke 
added the far rarer art of lighting them up by broad prin- 
ciples, and placing himself and his readers at the highest 
and most effective point of view for commanding their 
general bearings. 

If Burke had been the Irish adventurer that his enemies 
described, he might well have seized with impatience the 
opening to office that the recent exhibition of his powers 
in the House of Commons had now made accessible to 
him. There was not a man in Great Britain to whom the 
emoluments of office would have been more useful. It is 
one of the standing mysteries in literary biography, how 
Burke could think of entering Parliament without any 
means that anybody can now trace of earning a fitting 
livelihood. Yet at this time Burke, whom we saw not 
long ago writing for the booksellers, had become affluent 



32 BURKE. [chap. 

enough to pay a yearly allowance to Barry, the painter, 
in order to enable him to study the pictures in the great 
European galleries, and to mate a prolonged residence at 
Rome. A little later he took a step which makes the rid- 
dle still more difficult, and which has given abundant em- 
ployment to wits who are maximi in minimis, and think 
that every question which they can ask, yet to which his- 
tory has thought it worth while to leave no answer, is 
somehow a triumph of their own learning and dialectic. 

In 1769 Burke purchased a house and lands known as 
Gregories, in the parishes of Penn and Beaconsfield, in the 
county of Bucks. It has often been asked, and naturally 
enough, how a man who, hardly more than a few months 
before, was still contented to earn an extra hundred pounds 
a year by writing for Dodsley, should now have launched 
out as the buyer of a fine house and estate, which cost up- 
wards of twenty-two thousand pounds, which could not be 
kept up on less than two thousand five hundred a year, 
and of which the returns did not amount to one-fifth of 
that sum. Whence did he procure the money, and what 
is perhaps more difficult to answer, how came he first to 
entertain the idea of a design so ill-proportioned to any- 
thing that we can now discern in his means and prospects ? 
The common answer from Burke's enemies, and even from 
some neutral inquirers, gives to every lover of this great 
man's high character an unpleasant shock. It is alleged 
that he had plunged into furious gambling in East India 
stock. The charge was current at the time, and it was 
speedily revived when Burke's abandonment of his party, 
after the French Revolution, exposed him to a thousand 
attacks of reckless and uncontrolled virulence. It has been 
stirred by one or two pertinacious critics nearer our own 
time, and none of the biographers have dealt with the per- 



II.] PURCHASE OF BEACONSFIELD. 33 

plexities of the matter as tliey ought to have done. No- 
body, indeed, has ever pretended to find one jot or tittle of 
direct evidence that Burke himself took a part in the gam- 
bling in India or other stocks. There is evidence that he 
was a holder of the stock, and no more. But what is un- 
deniable is that Richard Burke, his brother, William Burke, 
his intimate if not his kinsman, and Lord Yerney, his po- 
litical patron, were all three at this time engaged together 
in immense transactions in East India stock; that in 1769 
the stock fell violently ; that they were unable to pay their 
dLfferences ; and that in the very year in which Edmund 
Burke bought Gregories, they were utterly ruined, two of 
them beyond retrieval. Again it is clear that, after this, 
Richard Burke was engaged in land-jobbing in the West 
Indies ; that his claims were disputed by the Government 
as questionable and dishonest ; and that he lost his case. 
Edmund Burke was said, in the gossip of the day, to be 
deeply interested in land at Saint Vincent's. But there is 
no evidence. What cannot be denied is that an unpleasant 
taint of speculation and financial adventurership hung at 
one time about the whole connexion, and that the advent- 
ures invariably came to an unlucky end. 

Whether Edmund Burke and William Burke were rela- 
tions or not, and if so, in what degree they were relations, 
neither of them ever knew ; they believed that their fa- 
thers sometimes called one another cousins, and that was 
all that they had to say on the subject. But they were 
as intimate as brothers, and when William Burke went to 
mend his broken fortunes in India, Edmund Burke com- 
mended him to Philip Francis — then fighting his deadly 
duel of five years with Warren Hastings at Calcutta — as 
one whom he had tenderly loved, highly valued, and con- 
tinually lived with in an union not to be expressed, quite 



34 BURKE. [chap. 

since their boyish years. " Looking back to the course of 
my life," he wrote in 1771, "I remember no one consid- 
erable benefit in the whole of it which I did not, mediate- 
ly or immediately, derive from William Barke." There is 
nothing intrinsically incredible, therefore, considering this 
intimacy and the community of purse and home which 
subsisted among the three Burkes, in the theory that when 
Edmund Burke bought his property in Buckinghamshire, 
he looked for help from the speculations of Richard and 
William. However this may have been, from them no 
help came. Many years afterwards (1783), Lord Verney 
filed a bill in Chancery claiming from Edmund Burke a 
sum of 6000^., which he alleged that he had lent at the 
instigation of William Burke to assist in completing the 
purchase of Beaconsfield. Burke's sworn answer denied 
all knowledge of the transaction, and the plaintiff did not 
get the relief for which he had prayed. 

In a letter to Shackleton (May 1, 1768) Burke gave the 
following account of what he had done: — "I have made 
a push," he says, " with all I could collect of ray own, and 
the aid of my friends, to cast a little root in this country. 
I have purchased a house, with an estate of about six hun- 
dred acres of land, in Buckinghamshire, twenty-four miles 
from London. It is a place exceedingly pleasant ; and I 
propose, God willing, to become a farmer in good earnest. 
You who are classical will not be displeased to know that 
it was formerly the seat of Waller, the poet, whose house, 
or part of it, makes at present the farm-house within an 
hundred yards of me." The details of the actual purchase 
of Beaconsfield have been made tolerably clear. The price 
was twenty-two thousand pounds, more or less. Fourteen 
thousand were left on mortgage, which remained outstand- 
ing until the sale of the property by Mrs. Burke in 1812. 



II.] BEACONSFIELD. 35 

Garret Barke, the elder brotlier, liad shortly before the 
purchase made Edmund his residuary legatee, and this be- 
quest is rather conjecturally estimated at two thousand 
pounds. The balance of six thousand was advanced by 
Lord Rockingham on Burke's bond. 

The purchase after all was the smallest part of the mat- 
ter, and it still remains a puzzle not only how Burke was 
able to maintain so handsome an establishment, but how 
he could ever suppose it likely that he would be able to 
maintain it. He counted, no doubt, on making some sort 
of income by farming, but then he might well have known 
that an absorbed politician would hardly be able, as he 
called it, to turn farmer in good earnest. For a short time 
he received a salary of seven hundred pounds a year as 
agent for New York. AVe may perhaps take for granted 
that he made as much more out of his acres. He received 
something from Dodsley for his work on the Annual Reg- 
ister down to 1788. But when all these resources have 
been counted up, we cannot but see the gulf of a great 
yearly deficit. The unhappy truth is that from the mid- 
dle of 1769, when we find him applying to Garrick for 
the loan of a thousand pounds, down to 1794, when the 
king gave him a pension, Burke w^as never free from the 
harassing strain of debts and want of money. It has 
been stated with good show of authority, that his obliga- 
tions to Lord Rockingham amounted to not less than thir- 
ty thousand pounds. When that nobleman died (1782), 
with a generosity which is not the less honourable to him 
for having been so richly earned by the faithful friend 
who was the object of it, he left instructions to his execu- 
tors that all Burke's bonds should be destroyed. 

We may indeed wish from the bottom of our hearts 
that all this had been otherwise. But those who press it 



36 BURKE. [chap. 

as a reproach against Burke's memory may be justly re- 
minded that when Pitt died, after drawing the pay of a 
minister for twenty years, he left debts to the amount of 
forty thousand pounds. Burke, as I have said elsewhere, 
had none of the vices of profusion, but he had that quality 
which Aristotle places high among the virtues — the noble 
mean of Magnificence, standing midway between the two 
extremes of vulgar ostentation and narrow pettiness. x\t 
least, every creditor was paid in good time, and nobody 
suffered but himself. Those who think these disagreeable 
matters of supreme importance, and allow such things to 
stand between them and Burke's greatness, are like the 
people — slightly to alter a figure from a philosopher of 
old — who, when they went to Olympia, could only per- 
ceive that they were scorched by the sun, and pressed by 
the crowd, and deprived of comfortable means of bathing, 
and wetted by the rain, and that life was full of disagree- 
able and troublesome things, and so they almost forgot the 
great colossus of ivory and gold, Phidias's statue of Zeus, 
which they had come to see, and which stood in all its 
glory and power before their perturbed and foolish vision. 
There have been few men in history with whom per- 
sonal objects counted for so little as they counted with 
Burke. He really did what so many public men only 
feign to do. He forgot that he had any interests of his 
own to be promoted, apart from the interests of the party 
with which he acted, and from those of the whole nation, 
for which he held himself a trustee. What William 
Burke said of him in 1766 was true throughout his life 
— " Ned is full of real business, intent upon doing solid 
good to his country, as much as if he was to receive twenty 
per cent, from the Empire." Such men as the shrewd and 
impudent Eigby atoned for a plebeian origin by the arts 



11.] BEACONSFIELD. 37 

of dependence and a judicious servility, and drew more 
of the public money from tlie pay ojQBce in half-a-dozen 
quarter-days than Burke received in all his life. It was 
not by such arts that Burke rose. When we remember 
all the untold bitterness of the struggle in which he was 
engaged, from the time when the old Duke of Newcastle 
tried to make the Marquis of Rockingham dismiss his new 
private secretary as an Irish Jesuit in disguise (1765), 
down to the time when the Duke of Bedford, himself bat- 
tening " in grants to the house of Russell, so enormous as 
not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibil- 
ity," assailed the government for giving Burke a moderate 
pension, we may almost imagine that if Johnson had imi- 
tated the famous Tenth Satire a little later, he would have 
been tempted to apply the poet's cynical criticism of the 
career heroic to the greater Cicero of his own day. " I 
was not," Burke said, in a passage of lofty dignity, " like 
his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled 
into a legislator; Nitor in adversum is the motto for a 
man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor 
cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the fa- 
vour and protection of the great. I was not made for a 
minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of win- 
ning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings of the 
people. At every step of my progress in life, for in every 
step was I traversed and opposed, and at every turnpike I 
met I was obliged to show my passport, and again and 
again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful 
to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unac- 
quainted with its laws, and the whole system of its inter- 
ests both abroad and at home ; otherwise no rank, no tol- 
eration even for me." 



CHAPTER III. 

THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE. 

Foreign observers of our affairs looked upon the state of 
England between the accession of George III. and the loss 
of the American colonies (1760-1776), with mixed dis- 
gust and satisfaction. Their instinct as absolute rulers 
was revolted by a spectacle of unbridled faction and raging 
anarchy ; their envy was soothed by the growing weakness 
of a power which Chatham had so short a time before left 
at the highest point of grandeur and strength. Frederick 
the Great spoke with contempt of the insolence of Opposi- 
tion and the virulence of parties ; ^nd vowed that, petty 
German prince as he was, he would not change places with 
the King of England. The Emperor Joseph pronounced 
positively that Great Britain was declining, that Parlia- 
ment was ruining itself, and that the colonies threatened 
a catastrophe. Catherine of Russia thought that nothing 
would restore its ancient vigour to the realm, short of the 
bracing and heroic remedy of a war. Even at home, such 
shrewd and experienced onlookers as Horace Walpole sus- 
pected that the state of the country was more serious than 
it had been since the Great Rebellion, and declared it to 
be approaching by fast strides to some sharp crisis. Men 
who remembered their Roman history, fancied that they 
saw every symptom of confusion that preceded the ruin 
of the Commonwealth, and began to inquire uneasily what; 



CHAP. III.] THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE. 39 

was the temper of the army. Men who remembered the 
story of the violence and insatiable factiousness of Flor- 
ence, turned again to Macchiavelli and to Guicciardini, to 
trace a parallel between the fierce city on the Arno and 
the fierce city on the Thames. When the King of Sweden, 
in 1772, carried out a revolution, by abolishing an oligarch- 
ic council and assuming the powers of a dictator, with 
the assent of his people, there were actually serious men 
in England who thought that the English, after having 
been guilty of every meanness and corruption, would soon, 
like the Swedes, own themselves unworthy to be free. 
The Duke of Richmond, who happened to have a claim to 
a peerage and an estate in France, excused himself for 
taking so much pains to establish his claim to them, by 
gravely asking who knew that a time might not soon come 
when England would not be worthy living in, and when a 
retreat to France might be a very happy thing for a free 
man to have ? 

The reign had begun by a furious outbreak of hatred 
between the English and the Scotch. Lord Bute had 
been driven from oflSce, not merely because he was sup- 
posed to owe his power to a scandalous friendship with 
the King's mother, but because he was accused of crowding 
the public service with his detested countrymen from the 
other side of the Tweed. He fell, less from disapproval of 
his policy than from rude prejudice against his country. 
The flow of angry emotion had not subsided before the 
whisper of strife in the American colonies began to trouble 
the air; and before that had waxed loud, the Middlesex 
election had blown into a portentous hurricane. This 
was the first great constitutional case after Burke came 
into the House of Commons. As, moreover, it became a 
leading element in the crisis which was the occasion of 



40 BURKE. [chap. 

Burke's first remarkable essay in the literature of politics, 
it is as well to go over the facts. 

The Parliament to which he had first been returned, 
now approaching the expiry of its legal term, was dis- 
solved in the spring of 1768. Wilkes, then an outlaw in 
Paris, returned to England, and announced himself as a 
candidate for the City. When the election was over, his 
name stood last on the poll. But his ancient fame as 
the opponent and victim of the court five years before 
were revived. After his rejection in the City, he found 
himself strong enough to stand for the county of Mid- 
dlesex. Here he was returned at the head of the poll 
after an excited election. Wilkes had been tried in 1764, 
and found guilty by the King's Bench of republishing 
Number Forty-five of the North Briton^ and of printing 
and publishing the Essay on Woman. He had not ap- 
peared to receive sentence, and had been outlawed in con- 
sequence. After his election for Middlesex, he obtained a 
reversal of his outlawry on the point of technical form. 
He then came up for sentence under the original verdict. 
The court sent him to prison for twenty-two months, and 
condemned him to pay a fine of a thousand pounds. 

Wilkes was in prison when the second session of the 
new Parliament began. His case came before the House 
in November, 1768, on his own petition, accusing Lord 
Mansfield of altering the record at his trial. After many 
acrimonious debates and examinations of Wilkes and oth- 
ers at the bar of the House, at length, by 219 votes against 
136, the famous motion was passed which expelled him 
from the House. Another election for Middlesex was now 
held, and Wilkes was returned without opposition. The 
day after the return, the House of Commons resolved, by 
an immense majority, that, having been expelled, Wilkes 



III.] PARLIAMENTARY PRIVILEGE. 41 

was incapable of serving- in that Parliament. The follow- 
ing month Wilkes was once more elected. The House 
once more declared the election void. In April another 
election took place, and this time the Government put for- 
ward Colonel Luttrell, who vacated his seat for Bossiney 
for the purpose of opposing Wilkes. There was the same 
result, and for the fourth time Wilkes was at the head of 
the poll. The House ordered the return to be altered, 
and after hearing by counsel the freeholders of Middlesex 
who petitioned against the alteration, finally confirmed it 
(May 8, 1769) by a majority of 221 to 152. According 
to Lord Temple, this was the greatest majority ever known 
on the last day of a session. 

The purport and significance of these arbitrary proceed- 
ings need little interpretation. The House, according to 
the authorities, had a constitutional right to expel Wilkes, 
though the grounds on which even this is defended would 
probably be questioned if a similar case were to arise in 
our own day. But a single branch of the legislature could 
have no power to pass an incapacitating vote either against 
Wilkes or anybody else. An Act of Parliament is the 
least instrument by which such incapacity could be im- 
posed. The House might perhaps expel Wilkes, but it 
could not either legally, or with regard to the less definite 
limits of constitutional morality, decide whom the Middle- 
sex freeholders should not elect, and it could not therefore 
set aside their representative, who was then free from any 
disabling quality. Lord Camden did not much exagger- 
ate, when he declared in a debate on the subject in the 
House of Lords, that the judgment passed upon the Mid- 
dlesex election had given the constitution a more danger- 
ous wound than any which were given during the twelve 
years* absence of Parliament in the reign of Charles I. 



42 BURKE. [chap. 

The House of Commons was usurping another form of 
that very dispensing power, for pretending to which the 
last of the Stuart sovereigns had lost his crown. If the 
House by a vote could deprive Wilkes of a right to sit, 
what legal or constitutional impediment would there be in 
the way, if the majority were at any time disposed to de- 
clare all their most formidable opponents in the minority 
incapable of sitting? 

In the same Parliament, there was another and scarcely 
less remarkable case of Privilege, " that eldest son of Pre- 
rogative," as Burke truly called it, " and inheriting all the 
vices of its parent." Certain printers were accused of 
breach of privilege for reporting the debates of the House 
(March, 1771). The messenger of the serjeant-at-arms 
attempted to take one of them into custody in his own 
shop in the City. A constable was standing by, designed- 
ly, it has been supposed, and Miller, the printer, gave the 
messenger into his custody for an assault. The case came 
on before the Lord Mayor, Alderman Wilkes, and Alder- 
man Oliver, the same evening, and the result was that the' 
messenger of the House was committed. The City doc- 
trine was, that if the House of Commons had a serjeant- 
at-arms, they had a serjeant-at-mace. If the House of 
Commons could send their citizens to Newgate, they could 
send its messenger to the Compter. Two other printers 
were collusively arrested, brought before Wilkes and Oli- 
ver, and at once liberated. 

The Commons instantly resolved on stem measures. 
The Lord Mayor and Oliver were taken and dispatched to 
the Tower, where they lay until the prorogation of Parlia- 
ment. Wilkes stubbornly refused to pay any attention to 
repeated summonses to attend at the bar of the House, 
very properly insisting that he ought to be summoned to 



HI.] PARLIAMEjS'TARY privilege. 43 

attend in his place as member for Middlesex. Besides 
committing Crosby and Oliver to the Tower, the House 
summoned the Lord Mayor's clerk to attend with his 
books, and then and there forced him to strike out the 
record of the recognisances into which their messenger 
had entered on being committed at the Mansion House. 
No Stuart ever did anything more arbitrary and illegal. 
The House deliberately intended to constitute itself, as 
Burke had said two years before, an arbitrary and despotic 
assembly. "The distempers of monarchy were the great 
subjects of apprehension and redress in the last century. 
In this, the distempers of Parliament." 

Burke, in a speech which he delivered in his place in 
1771, warned the House of the evils of the course upon 
which they were entering, and declared those to be their 
mortal enemies who would persuade them to act as if they 
were a self-originated magistracy, independent of the peo- 
ple, and unconnected with their opinions and feelings. 
But these mortal enemies of its very constitution were at 
this time the majority of the House. It was to no pur- 
pose that Burke argued with more than legal closeness 
that incapacitation could not be a power according to law, 
inasmuch as it had neither of the two properties of law : 
it was not known, " you yourself not knowing upon what 
grounds you will vote the incapacity of any man ;" and it 
was not fixed, because it was varied according to the occa- 
sion, exercised according to discretion, and no man could 
call for it as a right. A strain of unanswerable reasoning 
of this kind counted for nothing, in spite of its being un- 
answerable. Despotic or oligarchic pretensions are proof 
against the most formidable battery that reason and ex- 
perience can construct against them. And Wilkes's exclu- 
sion endured until this Parliament — the Unreported Parlia- 



44 BURKE. [chap. 

meut, as it was called, and in many respects the very worst 
that ever assembled at Westminster — was dissolved, and a 
new one elected (1774), when he was once again returned 
for Middlesex, and took his seat. 

The London multitude had grown zealous for Wilkes, 
and the town had been harassed by disorder. Of the 
fierce brutality of the crowd of that age, we may form a 
vivid idea from the unflinching pencil of Hogarth. Bar- 
barous laws were cruelly administered. The common peo- 
ple were turbulent, because misrule made them miserable. 
Wilkes had written filthy verses, but the crowd cared no 
more for this than their betters cared about the vices of 
Lord Sandwich. They made common cause with one who 
was accidentally a more conspicuous sufferer. AVilkes was 
quite right when he vowed that he was no Wilkite. The 
masses were better than their leader. " Whenever the 
people have a feeling," Burke once said, " they commonly 
are in the right: they sometimes mistake the physician." 
Franklin, who was then in London, was of opinion that if 
George IIL had had a bad character, and John Wilkes a 
good one, the latter might have turned the former out of 
the kingdom ; for the turbulence that began in street riots 
at one time threatened to end in revolt. The King 
himself was attacked with savage invective in papers of 
which it was said, that no one in the previous century 
would have dared to print any like them until Charles was 
fast Igcked up in Carisbrooke Castle. 

As is usual when the minds of those in power have 
been infected with an arbitrary temper, the employment 
of military force to crush civil disturbances became a fa- 
miliar and favourite idea. The military, said Lord Wey- 
mouth, in an elaborate letter which he addressed to the 
Surrey magistrates, can never be employed to a more con- 



III.] POPULAR DISORDER. 45 

stitutional purpose than in the support of the authority 
and dignity of the magistracy. If the magistrate should 
be menaced, he is cautioned not to delay a moment in 
calling for the aid of the military, and making use of 
them effectually. The consequence of this bloody scroll, 
as Wilkes rightly called it, was that shortly afterwards 
an affray occurred between the crowd and the troops, in 
which some twenty people were killed and wounded (May 
10, 1768). On the following day, the Secretary of War, 
Lord Barrington, wrote to the commanding officer, inform- 
ing him that the King highly approved of the conduct 
both of officers and men, and wished that his gracious ap- 
probation of them should be communicated to them. 

Burke brought the matter before the House in a motion 
for a Committee of Inquiry, supported by one of the most 
lucid and able of his minor speeches. " If ever the time 
should come," he concluded, " when this House shall be 
found prompt to execute and slow to inquire; ready to 
punish the excesses of the people, and slow to listen to 
their grievances ; ready to grant supplies, and slow to ex- 
amine the account ; ready to invest magistrates with large 
powers, and slow to inquire into the exercise of them ; 
ready to entertain notions of the military power as incor- 
porated with the constitution — when you learn this in the 
air of St. James's, then the business is done ; then the 
House of Commons will change that character which it 
receives from the people only." It is hardly necessary to 
say that his motion for a committee was lost by the over- 
whelming majority of two hundred and forty-five against 
thirty. The general result of the proceedings of the gov- 
ernment from the accession of George III. to the beginning 
of the troubles in the American colonies, was in Burke's 
own words, that the government was at once dreaded and 



46 BURKE. [chap. 

contemned ; that the laws were despoiled of all their re- 
spected and salutary terrors ; that their inaction was a sub- 
ject of ridicule, and their exertion of abhorrence ; that our 
dependencies had slackened in their affections ; that we 
knew neither how to yield nor how to enforce ; and that 
disconnection and confusion, in offices, in parties, in fami- 
lies, in Parliament, in the nation, prevailed beyond the dis- 
orders of any former time. 

It was in the pamphlet on the Present Discontents, pub- 
lished in 17*70, that Burke dealt at large with the whole 
scheme of policy of which all these irregularities were the 
distempered incidents. The pamphlet was composed as a 
manifesto of the Rockingham section of the Whig party, 
to show, as Burke wrote to his chief, how different it was 
in spirit and composition from "the Bedfords, the Gren- 
villes, and other knots, who are combined for no public 
purpose, but only as a means of furthering with joint 
strength their private and individual advantage." The 
pamphlet was submitted in manuscript or proof to the 
heads of the party. Friendly critics excused some inele- 
gancies which they thought they found in occasional pas- 
sages, by taking for granted, as was true, that he had ad- 
mitted insertions from other hands. Here for the first 
time he exhibited, on a conspicuous scale, the strongest 
qualities of his understanding. Contemporaries had an 
opportunity of measuring this strength, by comparison 
with another performance of similar scope. The letters 
of Junius had startled the world the year before. Burke 
was universally suspected of being their author, and the 
suspicion never wholly died out so long as he lived. There 
was no real ground for it beyond the two unconnected 
facts, that the letters were powerful letters, and that Burke 
had a powerful intellect. Dr. Johnson admitted that he 



I 



ni.] THOUOnXS ON THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS. 47 

had never had a better reason for believing that Burke 
was Junius, than that he knew nobody else who had the 
ability of Junius. But Johnson discharged his mind of 
the thought, at the instant that Burke voluntarily assured 
him that he neither wrote the letters of Junius nor knew 
who had written them. The subjects and aim of those 
famous pieces were not very different from Burke's tract, 
but any one who in our time turns from the letters to the 
tract will wonder how the author of the one could ever 
have been suspected of writing the other. Junius is never 
more than a railer, and very often he is third-rate even as 
a railer. The author of the Present Discontents speaks 
without bitterness even of Lord Bute and the Duke of 
Grafton ; he only refers to persons, when their conduct or 
their situation illustrates a principle. Instead of reviling, 
he probes, he reflects, he warns ; and as the result of this 
serious method, pursued by a man in whom close mastery 
of detail kept exact pace with wide grasp of generalities, 
we have not the ephemeral diatribe of a faction, but one 
of the monumental pieces of political literature. 

The last great pamphlet in the history of English pub- 
lic affairs had been Swift's tract On the Conduct of the 
Allies (iTll), in which the writer did a more substantial 
service for the Tory party of his day than Burke did for 
the Whig party of a later date. Swift's pamphlet is close, 
strenuous, persuasive, and full of telling strokes ; but no- 
body need read it to-day, except the historical student, or 
a member of the Peace Society, in search of the most 
convincing exposure of the most insane of English wars.^ 
There is not a sentence in it which does not belong exclu- 
sively to the matter in hand : not a line of that general 

^ This was not Burke's judgment on the long war against Louis 
XIV. See Regicide Peace^ i. 



48 BtJKKE. [chap. 

wisdom which is for all time. In the Present Discontents 
the method is just the opposite of this. The details are 
slurred, and they are not literal. Burke describes with 
excess of elaboration how the new system is a system of 
double cabinets ; one put forward with nominal powers in 
Parliament, the other concealed behind the throne, and se- 
cretly dictating the policy. The reader feels that this is 
worked out far too closely to be real. It is a structure of 
artificial rhetoric. But we lightly pass this over, on our 
way to more solid matter ; to the exposition of the prin- 
ciples of a constitution, the right methods of statesman- 
ship, and the defence of party. 

It was Bolingbroke, and not Swift, of w^hom Burke was 
thinking, when he sat down to the composition of his 
tract. The Patriot King was the fountain of the new 
doctrines, which Burke trained his party to understand 
and to resist. If his foe was domestic, it was from a for- 
eign armoury that Burke derived the instruments of re- 
sistance. The great fault of political writers is their too 
close adherence to the forms of the system of state which 
they happen to be expounding or examining. They stop 
short at the anatomy of institutions, and do not penetrate 
to the secret of their functions. An illustrious author 
in the middle of the eighteenth century introduced his 
contemporaries to a better way. It is not too much to 
say that at that epoch the strength of political specula- 
tion in this country, from Adam Smith downwards, was 
drawn from France ; and Burke had been led to some of 
what was most characteristic in his philosophy of society 
by Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws (1748), the first great 
manual of the historic school. We have no space here to 
work out the relations between Montesquieu's principles 
and Burke's, but the student of the Esprit des Lois will 



III.] THOUGHTS ON THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS. 49 

recognize its influence in every one of Burke's master- 
pieces. 

So far as immediate events were concerned, Burke was 
quick to discern their true interpretation. As has been 
already said, he attributed to the King and his party a 
deliberateness of system which probably had no real ex- 
istence in their minds. The Kino- intended to reassert 
the old right of choosing his own ministers. George II. 
had made strenuous but futile endeavours to the same 
end. His son, the father of George III., Frederick, Prince 
of Wales, as every reader of Dodington's Diary will re- 
member, was equally bent on throwing off the yoke of the 
great Whig combinations, and making his own cabinets. 
George III. was only continuing the purpose of his father 
and his grandfather ; and there is no reason to believe 
that he ^vent more elaborately to work to obtain his ends. 

It is when he leaves the artifices of a cabal, and strikes 
down below the surface to the work'ng of deep social 
forces, that we feel the breadth and power of Burke's 
method. "I am not one of those," he began, "who 
think that the people are never wrong. They have been 
so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries 
and in this. But I do say that in all disputes between 
them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a 
par in favour of the jpeople.^^ Nay, experience perhaps 
justifies him in going further. When popular discontents 
are prevalent, something has generally been found amiss 
in the constitution or the administration. "The people 
have no interest in disorder. When they go wrong, it is 
their error, and not their crime." And then he quotes the 
famous passage from the Memoirs of Sully, which both 
practical politicians and political students should bind 
about their necks, and write upon the tables of their 
3* 



50 BURKE. [chap. 

hearts : " The revolutions that come to pass in great states 
are not the result of chance, nor of popular caprice. . . , 
As for the populace, it is never from a passion for attack 
that it rebels, but from impatience of suffering." 

What really gives its distinction to the Present Dis- 
contents is not its plea for indulgence to popular impa- 
tience, nor its plea for the superiority of government by 
aristocracy, but rather the presence in it of the thought of 
Montesquieu and his school, of the necessity of studying 
political phenomena in relation, not merely to forms of 
government and law, but in relation to whole groups of 
social facts which give to law and government the spirit 
that makes them workable. Connected with this, is a 
particularly wide interpretation and a particularly impres- 
sive application of the maxims of expediency, because a 
wide conception of the various interacting elements of a 
society naturally extends the considerations which a bal- 
ance of expediencies will include. Hence, in time, there 
came a strong and lofty ideal of the true statesman, his 
breadth of vision, his flexibility of temper, his hardly 
measurable influence. These are the principal thoughts 
in the Discontents to which that tract owes its permanent 
interest. " Whatever original energy," says Burke, in one 
place, " may be supposed either in force or regulation, the 
operation of both is in truth merely instrumental. Na- 
tions are governed by the same methods, and on the same 
principles, by which an individual without authority is 
often able to govern those who are his equals or superiors ; 
by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious man- 
agement of it. . . . The laws reach but a very little way. 
Constitute Government how you please, infinitely the 
greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of pow- 
ers, which are left at large to the prudence and upright- 



III.] THOUGHTS ON THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS. 51 

ness of ministers of state. Even all the use and potency 
of the laws depends upon them. Without them, your 
Commonwealth is no better than a scheme upon paper ; 
and not a living, active, effective constitution.'''' Thus early 
in his public career had Burke seized that great antithe- 
sis which he so eloquently laboured in the long and ever 
memorable episode of his war against the French Revo- 
lution : the opposition between artificial arrangements in 
politics, and a living, active, effective organization, formed 
by what he calls elsewhere in the present tract, the natural 
strength of the kingdom, and suitable to the temper and 
mental habits of the people. When he spoke of the nat- 
ural strength of the kingdom, he gave no narrow or con- 
ventional account of it. He included in the elements of 
that strength, besides the great peers and the leading land- 
ed gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manufacturers, 
and the substantial yeomanry. Contrasted with the trite 
versions of government as fixed in King, Lords, and Com- 
mons, this search for the real organs of power w^as going 
to the root of the matter in a spirit at once thoroughly 
scientific and thoroughly practical. Burke had, by the 
speculative training to which he had submitted himself 
in dealing with Bolingbroke, prepared his mind for a 
complete grasp of the idea of the body politic as a com- 
plex growth, a manifold whole, with closely interdepend- 
ent relations "kmong its several parts and divisions. It 
was this conception from which his conservatism sprang. 
Revolutionary politics have one of their sources in the 
idea that societies are capable of infinite and immediate 
modifications, without reference to the deep-rooted condi- 
tions that have worked themselves into every part of the 
social structure. 

The same opposition of the positive to the doctrinaire 



52 BUKKE. [chap. 

spirit is to be observed in the remarkable vindication of 
Party, whicli fills the last dozen pages of the pamphlet, 
and which is one of the most courageous of all Burke's 
deliverances. Party combination is exactly one of those 
contrivances which, as it might seem, a wise man would 
accept for working purposes, but about which he would 
take care to say as little as possible. There appears to be 
something revolting to the intellectual integrity and self- 
respect of the individual, in the systematic surrender of 
his personal action, interest, and power, to a political con- 
nexion in which his own judgment may never once be 
allowed to count for anything. It is like the surrender 
of the right of private judgment to the authority of the 
Church, but with its nakedness not concealed by a mystic 
doctrine. Nothing is more easy to demolish by the bare 
logical reason. But Burke cared nothing about the bare 
logical reason, until it had been clothed in convenience 
and custom, in the affections on one side, and experience 
on the other. Not content with insisting that for some 
special purpose of the hour, " when bad men combine, the 
good must associate," he contended boldly for the merits 
of fidelity to party combination in itself. Although Burke 
wrote these strong pages as a reply to Bolingbroke, who 
had denounced party as an evil, they remain as the best 
general apology that has ever been offered for that prin- 
ciple of public action, against more philosophic attacks 
than Bolino'broke's. Burke admitted that when he saw a 
man acting a desultory and disconnected part in public 
life with detriment to his fortune, he was ready to believe 
such a man to be in earnest, though not ready to believe 
him to be right. In any case he lamented to see rare 
and valuable qualities squandered away without any public 
utility. He admitted, moreover, on the other hand, that 



III.] DEFENCE OF PARTY. 63 

people frequently acquired in party confederacies a nar- 
row, bigoted, and proscriptive spirit. " But where duty 
renders a critical situation a necessary one, it is our busi- 
ness to keep free from the evils attendant upon it, and 
not to fly from the situation itself. It is surely no very 
rational account of a man that he has always acted right ; 
but has taken special care to act in such a manner that 
his endeavours could not possibly be productive of any 
consequence. . . . When men are not acquainted with each 
other's principles, nor experienced in each other's talents, 
nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and disposi- 
tions by joint efforts of business ; no personal confidence, 
no friendship, no common interest subsisting among them ; 
it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part 
with uniformity, perseverance, or eflScacy." 

In terras of eloquent eulogy he praised the sacred rev- 
erence with which the Romans used to regard the neces- 
situdo sortis, or the relations that grew up between men 
who had only held office together by the casual fortune 
of the lot. He pointed out to emulation the Whig junto 
who held so close together in the reign of Anne — Sunder- 
land, Godolphin, Somers, and Marlborough — who believed 
"that no men could act with effect who did not act in 
concert; that no men could act in concert who did not 
act with confidence ; and that no men could act with con- 
fidence who were not bound together by common opin- 
ions, common affections, and common interests." In read- 
ing these energetic passages we have to remember two 
things : first, that the writer assumes the direct object of 
party combination to be generous, great, and liberal causes ; 
and, second, that when the time came, and when he be- 
lieved that his friends were espousing a wrong and per- 
nicious cause, Burke, like Samson bursting asunder the 



64 BURKE. [chap. 

seven green withes, broke away from the friendships of a 
life, and deliberately broke his party in pieces.^ 

When Burke came to discuss the cure for the disorders 
of 1770, he insisted on contenting himself with what he 
ought to have known to be obviously inadequate prescrip- 
tions. And we cannot help feeling that he never speaks 
of the constitution of the government of this country 
without gliding into a fallacy identical with that which he 
himself described and denounced, as thinking better of the 
wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it 
deserved. He was uniformly consistent in his view of 
the remedies which the various sections of Opposition pro- 
posed against the existing debasement and servility of the 
Lower House. The Duke of Richmond wanted universal 
suffrage, equal electoral districts, and annual parliaments. 
Wilkes proposed to disfranchise the rotten boroughs, to 
increase the county constituencies, and to give members 
to rich, populous, trading towns — a general policy Avhich 
was accepted fifty -six years afterwards. The Constitu- 
tional Society desired frequent parliaments, the exclusion 
of placemen from the House, and the increase of the coun- 
ty representation. Burke uniformly refused to give his 
countenance to any proposals such as these, which involved 
a clearly organic change in the constitution. He confessed 
that he had no sort of reliance upon either a triennial par- 
liament or a place-bill, and with that reasonableness which 
as a rule was fully as remarkable in him as his eloquence, 
he shov^ed very good grounds for his want of faith in the 
popular specifics. In truth, triennial or annual parlia- 
ments could have done no good, unless the change had 
been accompanied by the more important process of 
amputating, as Chatham called it, the rotten boroughs. 
^ See on the same subject, Corresp. ii. 276-7. 



III.] BURKE'S REMEDIES. 55 

Of these the Crown could at that time reckon some sev- 
enty as its own property. Besides those which belonged 
to the Crown, there was also the immense number which 
belonged to the Peerage. If the King sought to strengthen 
an administration, the thing needful was not to enlist the 
services of able and distinguished men, but to conciliate 
a duke, who brought with him the control of a given 
quantity of voting power in the Lower House. All this 
patrician influence, which may be found at the bottom of 
most of the intrigues of the period, would not have been 
touched by curtailing the duration of parliaments. 

What then was the remedy, or had Burke no remedy to 
offer for these grave distempers of Parliament ? Only the 
remedy of the interposition of the body of the people it- 
self. We must beware of interpreting this phrase in the 
modern democratic sense. In 1766 he had deliberately 
declared that he thought it would be more conformable to 
the spirit of the constitution, " by lessening the number, 
to add to the weight and independency of our voters." 
" Considering the immense and dangerous charge of elec- 
tions, the prostitute and daring venality, the corruption of 
manners, the idleness and profligacy of the lower sort of 
voters, no prudent man would propose to increase such an 
evil."^ In another place he denies that the people have 
either enough of speculation in the closet, or of experience 
in business, to be competent judges, not of the detail of 
particular measures only, but of general schemes of policy.^ 
On Burke's theory, the people, as a rule, were no more 
concerned to interfere with Parliament, than a man is con- 
cerned to interfere with somebody whom he has voluntari- 
ly and deliberately made his trustee. But here, he con- 

* Observations on late State of the Nation^ Works, 1. 105, b. 
' Speech on Duration of Parliaments. 



66 BURKE. [chap. 

fessed, was a sharneful and ruinous breacli of trust. The 
ordinary rule of government was being every day mis- 
chievously contemned and daringly set aside. Until the 
confidence thus outraged should be once more restored, 
then the people ought to be excited to a niore strict and 
detailed attention to the conduct of their representatives. 
The meetings of counties and corporations ought to settle 
standards for judging more systematically of the behav- 
iour of those whom they had sent to Parliament. Fre- 
quent and correct lists of the voters in all important ques- 
tions ought to be procured. The severest discouragement 
ought to be given to the pernicious practice of affording a 
blind and undistinguishing support to every administra- 
tion. "Parliamentary support comes and goes with oflSce, 
totally regardless of the man or the merit." For instance, 
Wilkes's annual motion to expunge the votes upon the 
Middlesex election had been uniformly rejected, as often 
as it was made while Lord North was in power. Lord 
North had no sooner given way to the Eockingham Cabi- 
net, than the House of Comuions changed its mind, and 
the resolutions were expunged by a handsome majority of 
115 to 47. Administration was omnipotent in the House, 
because it could be a man's most efficient friend at an 
election, and could most amply reward his fidelity after- 
wards. Against this system Burke called on the nation 
to set a stern face. Root it up, he kept crying ; settle the 
general course in which you desire members to go ; insist 
that they shall not suffer themselves to be diverted from 
this by the authority of the government of the day ; let 
lists of votes be published, so that you may ascertain for 
yourselves whether your trustees have been faithful or 
fraudulent; do all this, and there will be no need to re- 
sort to those organic changes, those empirical innovations, 



in.] HIS LOVE OF THE CONSTITUTION. 67 

which may possibly cure, but are much more likely to 
destroy. 

It is not surprising that so halting a policy should have 
given deep displeasure to very many, perhaps to most, of 
those whose only common bond was the loose and negative 
sentiment of antipathy to the court, the ministry, and the 
too servile majority of the House of Commons. The Con- 
stitutional Society was furious. Lord Chatham wrote to 
Lord Rockingham that the work in which these 'doctrines 
first appeared must do much mischief to the common 
cause. But Burke's view of the constitution was a part 
of his belief with which he never paltered, and on which 
he surrendered his judgment to no man. " Our constitu- 
tion," in his opinion, "stands on a nice equipoise, with 
steep precipices and deep waters upon all sides of it. Li 
removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one side, 
there may be a risk of oversetting it on the other." ^ This 
image was ever before his mind. It occurs again in the 
last sentence of that great protest against all change and 
movement, when he describes himself as one who, when 
the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be en- 
dangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of 
carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which 
may preserve its equipoise.' AVhen we think of the odi- 
ous misgovernment in England which the constitution 
permitted, between the time when Burke wrote and the 
passing of Lord Sidmouth's Six Acts fifty years later, we 
may be inclined to class such a constitution among the 
most inadequate and mischievous political arrangements 
that any free country has ever had to endure. Yet it was 
this which Burke declared that he looked upon with filial 

^ Present Biscotitents. 

' Reflections on tlie French Revolution, 



68 BURKE. [chap. 

reverence. "Never will I cut it in pieces, and put it into 
the kettle of any magician, in order to boil it with the pud- 
dle of their compounds into youth and vigour ; on the con- 
trary, I will drive away such pretenders ; I will nurse its ven- 
erable age, and with, lenient arts extend a parent's breath." 

He was filled with the spirit, and he borrowed the argu- 
ments, which have always marked the champion of faith 
and authority against the impious assault of reason or in- 
novation. The constitution was sacred to him as the voice 
of the Church and the oracles of her saints are sacred to 
the faithful. Study it, he cried, until you know how to 
admire it, and if you cannot know and admire, rather be- 
lieve that you are dull, than that the rest of the world has 
been imposed upon. We ought to understand it accord- 
ing to our measure, and to venerate where we are not able 
presently to comprehend. "Well has Burke been called the 
Bossuet of politics. 

Although, however, Burke's unflinching reverence for 
the constitution, and his reluctance to lay a finger upon it, 
may now seem clearly excessive, as it did to Chatham and 
his son, who were great men in the right, or to Beckford 
and Sawbridge, who were very little men in the right, we 
can only be just to him by comparing his ideas with those 
which were dominant throughout an evil reign. While 
he opposed more frequent parliaments, he still upheld 
the doctrine that " to govern according to the sense, and 
agreeably to the interests, of the people is a great and glo- 
rious object of government." While he declared himself 
against the addition of a hundred knights of the shire, he 
in the very same breath protested that, though the people 
might be deceived in their choice of an object, he " could 
scarcely conceive any choice they could make, to be so 
very mischievous as the existence of any human force ca- 



HI.] THE STRUGGLE DECIDED IN AMERICA. 59 

pable of resisting it."^ To us this may seem very mild 
and commonplace doctrine, but it was not commonplace 
in an age when Anglican divines — men like Archbishop 
Markham, Dr. Nowell, or Dr. Porteous — had revived the 
base precepts of passive obedience and non-resistance, and 
when such a man as Lord Mansfield encouraged them. 
And these were the kind of foundations which Burke had 
been laying, while Fox was yet a Tory, while Sheridan was 
writing farces, and while Grey was a schoolboy. 

It is, however, almost demonstrably certain that the vin- 
dication of the supremacy of popular interests over all oth- 
er considerations would have been bootless toil, and that 
the great constitutional straggle from 1760 to 1783 would 
have ended otherwise than it did, but for the failure of the 
war against the insurgent colonies, and the final establish- 
ment of American Independence. It was this portentous 
transaction which finally routed the arbitrary and despotic 
pretensions of the House of Commons over the people, 
and which put an end to the hopes entertained by the sov- 
ereign of making his personal will supreme in the Cham- 
bers. Fox might well talk of an early Loyalist victory 
in the war, as the terrible news from Long Island. The 
struggle which began unsuccessfully at Brentford in Mid- 
dlesex, was continued at Boston in Massachusetts. The 
scene had changed, but the conflicting principles were the 
same. The war of Independence was virtually a second 
English civil war. The ruin of the American cause would 
have been also the ruin of the constitutional cause in Eng- 
land ; and a patriotic Englishman may revere the memory 
of Patrick Henry and George Washington not less just- 
ly than the patriotic American. Burke's attitude in this 
great contest is that part of his history about the majestic 
and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute. 
^ To the Chairman of the Buchinghamshire Meeting^ 1780. 



/ 



CHAPTER ly. 

THE ROCKINGHAM PARTY PARIS ELECTION AT BRISTOL — ■ 

THE AMERICAN WAR. 

The war witli the American colonies was preceded by an 
interval of stupor. The violent ferment which had been 
stirred in the nation by the affairs of Wilkes and the Mid- 
dlesex election was followed, as Burke said, by as remark- 
able a deadness and vapidity. In 1770 the distracted 
ministry of the Duke of Grafton came to an end, and was 
succeeded by that of Lord North. The King liad at last 
triumphed. He had secured an administration of which 
the fundamental principle was that the sovereign was to. 
be the virtual head of it, and the real director of its coun-^^ 
sels. Lord North's government lasted for twelve years, 
and its career is for ever associated with one of the most 
momentous chapters in the history of the English nation 
and of free institutions. 

Through this long and eventful period, Burke's was as 
the voice of one crying in the wilderness. He had be- 
come important enough for the ministry to think it worth 
while to take pains to discredit him. They busily encour- 
aged the report that he was Junius, or a close ally to Ju- 
nius. This was one of the minor vexations of Burke's mid- 
dle life. Even his friends continued to torment him for 
incessant disclaimers. Burke's lofty pride made him slow 
to deal positively with what he scorned as a malicious and 



CHAP. IV.] BURKE AND JUNIUS. 61 

unworthy imputation. To such a friend as Johnson ho 
did not, as we have seen, disdain to volunteer a denial, but 
Charles Townshend was forced to write more than one im- 
portunate letter before he could extract from Burke the 
definite sentence (Nov. 24, lV7l) : "I now give you my 
word and honour that I am not the author of Junius, and 
that I know not the author of that paper, and I do author- 
ize you to say so." Nor was this the only kind of annoy- 
ance to which he was subjected. His rising fame kindled 
the candour of the friends of his youth. With proverbial 
good - nature, they admonished him that he did not bear 
instruction ; that he showed such arrogance as in a man 
of his condition was intolerable ; that he snapped furious- 
ly at his parliamentary foes, like a wolf who had broken 
into the fold ; that his speeclfes were useless declamations ; 
and that he disgraced the House b}'' the scurrilities of the 
bear-garden. These sharp chastenings of friendship Burke 
endured with the perfect self-command, not of the cold 
and indifferent egotist, but of one who had trained himself 
not to expect too much from men. He possessed the true 
solace for all private chagrins in the activity and the fer- 
vour of his public interests. 

In 1772 the affairs of the East India Company, and its 
relations with the Government, had fallen into disorder. 
The Opposition, though powerless in the Houses of Par- 
liament, were often able to thwart the views of the minis- 
try in the imperial board-room in Leadenhall Street. The 
Duke of Richmond was as zealous and as active in his op- 
position to Lord North in the business of the East Indies 
as he was in the business of the country at Westminster. 
A proposal was made to Burke to go out to India at the 
head of a commission of three supervisors, with authority 
to examine the concerns of every department, and full 



62 BURKE. [chap. 

powers of control over the company's servants. Though 
this offer was pressed by the directors, Burke, after anxious 
consideration, declined it. What his reasons were, there is 
no evidence ; we can only guess that he thought less of his 
personal interests than of those of the country and of his 
party. Without him the Rockingham connexion would 
undoubtedly have fallen to ruin, and with it the most up- 
right, consistent, and disinterested body of men then in 
public life. " You say," the Duke of Richmond wrote to 
him (Nov. 15, 1V72), "the party is an object of too much 
importance to go to pieces. Indeed, Burke, you have 
more merit than any man in keeping us together." It 
was the character of the party, almost as much as their 
principles, that secured Burke's zeal and attachment ; their 
decorum, their constancy, their aversion to all cabals for 
private objects, their indifference to office, except as an in- 
strument of power and a means of carrying out the policy 
of their convictions. They might easily have had office, 
if they would have come in upon the King's terms. A 
year after his fall from power. Lord Rockingham was sum- 
moned to the royal closet, and pressed to resume his post. 
But office at any price was not in their thoughts. They 
knew the penalties of their system, and they clung to it 
undeterred. Their patriotism was deliberate and consid- 
ered. Chalcedon was called the city of the blind, because 
its founders wilfully neglected the more glorious site of 
Byzantium which lay under their eyes. " We have built 
our Chalcedon," said Burke, "with the chosen part of 
the universe full in our prospect." They had the faults to 
which an aristocratic party in opposition is naturally liable. 
Burke used to reproach them with being somewhat lan- 
guid, scrupulous, and unsystematic. He could not make 
the Duke of Richmond put off a large party at Goodwood 



IT.] THE ROCKIXGHAM PARTY. C3 

for the sake of an important division in the House of 
Lords ; and he did not always agree with Lord John Cav- 
endish as to what constitutes a decent and reasonable quan- 
tity of fox-hunting for a political leader in a crisis. But 
it was part of the steadfastness of his whole life to do his 
best with such materials as he could find ; he did not lose 
patience nor abate his effort, because his friends would 
miss the opportunity of a great political stroke, rather than 
they would miss Newmarket Races. He wrote their pro- 
tests for the House of Lords, composed petitions for coun- 
ty meetings, drafted resolutions, and plied them with in- 
formation, ideas, admonitions, and exhortations. Never 
before nor since has our country seen so extraordinary a 
union of the clever and indefatigable party-manager, with, 
the reflective and philosophic habits of the speculative 
publicist. It is much easier to make either absolutism or 
democracy attractive than aristocracy ; yet we see how 
consistent with his deep moral conservatism was Burke's 
attachment to an aristocratic party, when we read his ex- 
hortation to the Duke of Richmond to remember that per- , 
sons in his high station of life ought to have long views. 
"You people," he writes to the Duke (November 17, 
1772), "of great families and hereditary trusts and fort- 
unes, are not like such as I am, who, whatever we may be, 
by the rapidity of our growth, and even by the fruit we 
bear, and flatter ourselves that, while we creep on the 
ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size 
and flavour, yet still we are but annual plants that perish 
with our season, and leave no sort of traces behind us. 
You, if you are what you ought to be, are in my eye the 
great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate your ben- 
efits from generation to generation. The immediate pow- 
er of a Duke of Richmond, or a Marquis of Rockingham. 



64 BURKE. [chap. 

is not so much of moment ; but if their conduct and ex- 
iraple hand down their principles to their successors, then 
their houses become the public repositories and office of 
record for the constitution. ... I do not look upon your 
time or lives as lost, if in this sliding away from the genu- 
ine spirit of the country, certain parties, if possible — if not, 
the heads of certain families — should make it their busi- 
ness by the whole course of their lives, principally by their 
example, to mould into the very vital stamina of their de- 
scendants, those principles which ought to be transmitted 
pure and unmixed to posterity." 

Perhaps such a passage as this ought to be described 
less as reflection than as imagination — moral, historic, con- 
servative imagination — in which order, social continuity, 
and the endless projection of past into present, and of pres- 
ent into future, are clothed with the sanctity of an inner 
shrine. We may think that a fox-hunting duke and a 
racing marquis were very poor centres round which to 
group these high emotions. But Burke had no puny sen- 
timentalism, and none of the mere literary or romantic 
conservatism of men like Chateaubriand. He lived in the 
real world, and not in a false dream of some past world 
that had never been. He saw that the sporting squires of 
his party were as much the representatives of ancestral 
force and quality, as in older days were long lines of 
Claudii and Valerii. His conservative doctrine was a pro- 
found instinct, in part political, but in greater part moral. 
The accidental roughness of the symbol did not touch him, 
for the symbol was glorified by the sincerity of his faith 
and the compass of his imagination. 

With these ideas strong within him, in 1773 Burke 
made a journey to France. It was almost as though the 
solemn hierophant of some mystic Egyptian temple should 



IV.] JOURNEY TO FRANCE. 65 

have found himself amid the brilliant chatter of a band 
of reckless, keen-tongued disputants of the garden or the 
porch at Athens. His only son had just finished a suc- 
cessful school-course at AVestminster, and was now entered 
a student at Christ Church. He was still too young for 
the university, and Burke thought that a year could not 
be more profitably spent than in forming his tongue to 
foreign languages. The boy was placed at Auxerre, in the 
house of the business agent of the BisTiop of Auxerre. 
From the Bishop he received many kindnesses, to be am- 
ply repaid in after-years when the Bishop came in his old 
age, an exile and a beggar, to England. 

While in Paris, Burke did all that he could to instruct 
himself as to what was going on in French society. If he 
had not the dazzling reception which had greeted Hume 
in 1764, at least he had ample opportunities of acquaint- 
ing himself with the prevailing ideas of the times, in more 
than one of the social camps into which Paris was then 
divided. Madame du Deffand tells the Duchess of Choi- 
seul that though he speaks French extremely ill, everybody 
felt that he would be infinitely agreeable if he could more 
easily make himself understood. He followed French well 
enough as a listener, and went every day to the courts to 
hear the barristers and watch the procedure. Madame du 
Deffand showed him all possible attention, and her friends 
eagerly seconded her. She invited him to supper parties 
where he met the Count de Broglie, the agent of the king's 
secret diplomacy ; Caraccioli, successor of the nimble-wit- 
ted Galiani as minister from Naples; and other notabilities 
of the high world. He supped with the Duchess of Lux- 
embourg, and heard a reading of La Harpe's Barmecides. 
It was high treason in this circle to frequent the rival salon 
of Mademoiselle Lespinasse, but either the law was relaxed 
4 



66 BURKE. [chap. 

in the case of foreigners, or else Burke kept his own coun- 
sel. Here were for the moment the headquarters of the 
party of innovation, and here he saw some of the men who 
were busily forging- the thunderbolts. His eye was on the 
alert, now as always, for anything that might light up the 
sovereign problems of human government. A book, by a 
member of this circle, had appeared six months before, 
which was still the talk of the town, and against which the 
government had taken the usual impotent measures of re- 
pression. This was the Treatise on Tactics, by a certain 
M. de Guibert, a colonel of the Corsican legion. The im- 
portant part of the work was the introduction, in which 
the writer examined with what was then thought extraor- 
dinary hardihood, the social and political causes of the de- 
cline of the military art in France. Burke read it with 
keen interest and energetic approval. He was present at 
the reading of a tragedy by the same author, and gave 
some offence to the rival coterie by preferring Guibert's 
tragedy to La Harpe's. To us, however, of a later day, 
Guibert is known neither for his tragedy nor his essay on 
tactics, nor for a memory so rapid that he could open a 
book, throw one glance like a flash of lightning on to a 
page, and then instantly repeat from it half a dozen lines 
word for word. He lives in literature as the inspirer of 
that ardent passion of Mademoiselle Lespinasse's letters, so 
unique in their consuming intensity that, as has been said, 
they seem to burn the page on which they are written. It 
was, perhaps, at Mademoiselle Lespinasse's that Burke met 
Diderot. The eleven volumes of the illustrative plates of 
the Encyclopaedia had been given to the public twelve 
months before, and its editor was just released from the 
gianVs toil of twenty years. Yoltaire was in imperial exile 
at Ferney. Rousseau was copying music in a garret in the 



IV.] JOURNEY TO FRANCE. 67 

street which is now called after his name, but he had long 
ago cut himself off from society ; and Burke was not like- 
ly to take much trouble to find out a man whom he had 
known in England seven years before, and against whom 
he had conceived a strong and lasting antipathy, as enter- 
taining no principle either to influence his heart or to 
guide his understanding save a deranged and eccentric 
vanity. 

It was the fashion for English visitors to go to Versailles. 
They saw the dauphin and his brothers dine in public, be- 
fore a crowd of princes of the blood, nobles, abbes, and all 
the miscellaneous throng of a court. They attended mass 
in the chapel, where the old King, surrounded by bishops, 
sat in a pew just above that of Madame du Barri. The 
royal mistress astonished foreigners by hair without pow- 
der and cheeks without rouge, the simplest toilettes, and 
the most unassuming manners. Vice itself, in Burke's 
famous words, seemed to lose half its evil by losing all its 
grossness. And there, too, Burke had that vision to which 
we owe one of the most gorgeous pages in our literature — - 
Marie Antoinette, the young dauphiness, "decorating and 
cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, 
glittering like the morning-star, full of life and splendour 
and joy." The shadow was rapidly stealing on. The 
year after Burke's visit, the scene underwent a strange 
transformation. The King died; the mistress was ban- 
ished in luxurious exile ; and the dauphiness became the 
ill-starred Queen of France. Burke never forgot the emo- 
tions of the scene ; they awoke in his imagination sixteen 
years after, when all w^as changed, and the awful contrast 
shook him with a passion that his eloquence has made 
immortal. 

Madame du Deffand wrote to Horace Walpole that 



68 BURKE. [chap. 

Burke had been so well received, that he ought to leave 
France excellently pleased with the country. But it was 
not so. His spirit was perturbed by what he had listened 
to. He came away with small esteem for that busy fer- 
mentation of intellect in which his French friends most 
exulted, and for which they looked forward to the grati- 
tude and admiration of posterity. From the spot on 
which he stood there issued two mighty streams. It was 
from the ideas of the Parisian Freethinkers whom Burke 
so detested, that Jefferson, Franklin, and Henry drew those 
theories of human society which were so soon to find life 
In American Independence. It was from the same ideas 
that later on that revolutionary tide surged forth, in which 
Burke saw no elements of a blessed fertility, but only a 
horrid torrent of red and desolating Java. In 1773 there 
was a moment of strange repose in Western Europe, the 
little break of stillness that precedes the hurricane. It 
was, indeed, the eve of a momentous epoch. Before six- 
teen years were over, the American Republic had risen like 
a new constellation into the firmament, and the French 
monarchy, of such antiquity and fame and high pre-emi- 
nence in European history, had been shattered to the dust. 
We may not agree with Burke's appreciation of the forces 
that were behind these vast convulsions. But at least he 
saw, and saw with eyes of passionate alarm, that strong 
speculative forces were at work, which must violently 
prove the very bases of the great social superstructure, 
and might not improbably break them up for ever. 

Almost immediately after his return from France, he 
sounded a shrill note of warning. Some Methodists from 
Chatham had petitioned Parliament against a bill for 
the relief of Dissenters from subscription to the Articles. 
Burke denounced the intolerance of the petitioners. It is 



IV.] ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 69 

not the Dissenters, lie cried, whom you have to fear, but 
the men who, " not contented with endeavouring to turn 
your eyes from the blaze and effulgence of light, by which 
life and immortality is so gloriously demonstrated by the 
Gospel, would even extinguish that faint glimmering of 
Nature, that only comfort supplied to ignorant man before 
this great illumination. . . . These are the people against 
whom you ought to aim the shaft of the law; these are 
the men to whom, arrayed in all the terrors of government,' 
I would say, * You shall not degrade us into brutes.' . . . 
The most horrid and cruel blow that can be offered to civil 
society is through atheism. . . . The infidels are outlaws 
of the constitution, not of this country, but of the human 
race. They are never, never to be supported, never to be 
tolerated. Under the systematic attacks of these people, I 
see some of the props of good government already begin 
to fail ; I see propagated principles which will not leave to 
religion even a toleration. I see myself sinking every day 
under the attacks of these wretched people."^ To this 
pitch he had been excited by the vehement band of men, 
who had inscribed on their standard Ecraser Vlnfame. 

The second Parliament in which Burke had a seat was 
difssolved suddenly and without warning (October, 1774). 
The attitude of America was threatening, and it was be- 
lieved the Ministers were anxious to have the elections 
over before the state of things became worse. The whole 
kingdom was instantly in a ferment. Couriers, chaises, 
post-horses hurried in every direction over the island, and 
it was noted, as a measure of the agitation, that no fewer 
than sixty messengers passed through a single turnpike on 
one day. Sensible observers were glad to think that, in 
* Speech on Relief of Protestant Dissenters^ 1773. 



70 BURKE. [chap. 

consequence of the rapidity of the elections, less wine and 
money would be wasted than at any election for sixty 
years past. Burke had a houseful of company at Beacons- 
field when the news ariived. Johnson was among them, 
and as the party was hastily breaking up, the old Tory, 
took his Whig friend kindly by the hand : " Farewell, my 
dear sir," he said, " and remember that I wish you all the 
success that ought to be wished to you, and can possibly 
be wished to you, by an honest man." 

The words were of good omen. Burke was now re- 
warded by the discovery that his labours had earned for 
him recognition and gratitude beyond the narrow limits 
of a rather exclusive party. He had before this attracted 
the attention of the mercantile public. The Company of 
Merchants trading to Africa voted him their thanks for his 
share in supporting their establishments. The Committee 
of Trade at Manchester formally returned him their grate- 
ful acknowledgments for the active part that he had taken 
in the business of the Jamaica free ports. But then Man- 
chester returned no representative to Parliament. In two 
Parliaments Burke had been elected for Wendover free of 
expense. Lord Verney's circumstances were now so em- 
barrassed, that he was obliged to part with the four seats 
at his disposal to men who could pay for them. There 
had been some talk of proposing Burke for Westminster, 
and Wilkes, who was then omnipotent, promised him the 
support of the popular party. But the patriot's memory 
was treacherous, and he speedily forgot, for reasons of his 
own, an idea that had originated with himself. Burke's 
constancy of spirit was momentarily overclouded. *' Some- 
times when I am alone," he wrote to Lord Rockingham 
(September 15, 1774), "in spite of all my efforts, I fall 
into a melancholy which is inexpressible, and to which, if 



IV.] ELECTED FOR BRISTOL. H 

I gave way, I should not continue long under it, but must 
totally sink. Yet I do assure you that partly, and indeed 
principally, by the force of natural good spirits, and partly 
by a strong sense of what I ought to do, I bear up so well 
that no one who did not know them could easily discover 
the state of m'y mind or my circumstances. I have those 
that. are dear to me, for whom I must live as long as God 
pleases, and in what way he pleases. Whether I ought 
not totally to abandon this public station for which I am 
so unfit, and have of course been so unfortunate, I know 
not." But he was always saved from rash retirement from 
public business by two reflections. He doubted whether 
a man has a right to retire after he has once gone a certain 
length in these things. And he remembered that there 
are often obscure vexations in the most private life, which 
as effectually destroy a man's peace as anything that can 
occur in public contentions. 

Lord Rockingham offered his influence on behalf of 
Burke at Malton, one of the family boroughs in Yorkshire, 
and thither Burke in no high spirits betook himself. On 
his way to the north he heard that he had been nominated 
for Bristol, but the nomination had, for certain electioneer- 
ing reasons, not been approved by the party. As it hap- 
pened, Burke was no sooner chosen at Malton than, owing 
to an unexpected turn of affairs at Bristol, the idea of pro- 
posing him for a candidate revived. Messengers were sent 
express to his house in London, and, not finding him there, 
they hastened down to Yorkshire. Burke quickly resolved 
that the offer was too important to be rejected. Bristol 
was the capital of the west, and it was still in wealth, pop- 
ulation, and mercantile activity the second city of the king- 
dom. To be invited to stand for so great a constituency, 
without any request of his own and free of personal ex- 



12 BURKE. [chap. 

pense, was a distinction whicTi no politician could hold 
lightly. Burke rose from the table where he was dining 
with some of his supporters, stepped into a post-chaise at 
six on a Tuesday evening, and travelled without a break 
until he reached Bristol on the Thursday afternoon, hav- 
ing got over two hundred and seventy miles in forty-four 
hours. Not only did he execute the journey without a 
break, but, as he told the people of Bristol, with an exult- 
ing commemoration of his own zeal that recalls Cicero, he 
did not sleep for an instant in the interval. The poll was 
kept open for a month, and the contest vf as the most tedi- 
ous that had ever been known in the city, New freemen 
were admitted down to the very last day of the election. 
At the end of it, Burke was second on the poll, and was 
declared to be duly chosen (November 3, 1774). There 
was a petition against his return, but the election was con- 
firmed, and he continued to sit for Bristol for six years. 

The situation of a candidate is apt to find out a man^s 
weaker places. Burke stood the test. He showed none 
of the petulant rage of those clamorous politicians whose 
flight, as he said, is winged in a lower region of the air. 
As the traveller stands on the noble bridge that now spans 
the valley of the Avon, he may recall Burke's local com- 
parison of these busy, angry familiars of an election, to the 
gulls that skim the mud of the river when it is exhausted 
of its tide. He gave his new friends a more important 
lesson, when the time came for him to thank them for the 
honour which they had just conferred upon him. His 
colleague had opened the subject of the relations between 
a member of Parliament and his constituents; and had 
declared that, for his own part, he should regard the in- 
structions of the people of Bristol as decisive and binding. 
Burke in a weighty passage upheld a manlier doctrine. 



IV.] RELATIONS WITH HIS CONSTITUENTS. 73 

" Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a 
representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspond- 
ence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. 
Their wishes ought to have great weight with him ; their opinions 
high respect, their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to 
sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs ; and above 
all, ever, and: in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his 
unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, 
he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men 
living. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his 
judgment ; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it 
to your opinion. 

"My worthy colleague says, his will ought to be subservient to 
yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If government were a 
matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be su- 
perior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and 
judgment, and not of inclination ; and what sort of reason is that in 
which the determination precedes the discussion, in which one set of 
men deliberate and another decide, and where those who form the 
conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who 
hear the arguments? . . . Authoritative instructions, mandates is- 
sued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to 
vote and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest convictions of 
his judgment and conscience — these are things utterly unknown to 
the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake 
of the whole order and tenour of our Constitution."* 

For six years the British electors were content to be 
represented by a man of this independence. They never, 
however, really acquiesced in the principle that a member 
of Parliament owes as much to his own convictions as to 
the will of his constituents. In 1778 a bill was brought 
into Parliament, relaxing some of the restrictions imposed 
upon Ireland by the atrocious fiscal policy of Great Brit- 
ain. The great mercantile centres raised a furious outcry, 
and Bristol was as blind and as boisterous as Manchester 
* Speech at the conclusion of the Poll. 
4* 



74 BURKE. [chap. 

and Glasgow. Burke not only spoke and voted in favour 
of the commercial propositions, but urged that the pro- 
posed removal of restrictions on Irish trade did not go 
nearly far enough. There was none of that too familiar 
casuistry, by which public men argue themselves out of 
their consciences in a strange syllogism, that they can best 
serve the country in Parliament ; that to keep their seats 
they must follow their electors ; and that therefore, in the 
long run, they serve the country best by acquiescing in ig- 
norance and prejudice. Anybody can denounce an abuse. 
It needs valour and integrity to stand forth against a wrong 
to which our best friends are most ardently committed. 
It warms our hearts to think of the noble courage with 
which Burke faced the blind and vile selfishness of his 
own supporters. He reminded them that England only 
consented to leave to the Irish, in two or three instances, 
the use of the natural faculties which God had given them. 
He asked them whether Ireland was united to Great Brit- 
ain for no other purpose than that we should counteract 
the bounty of Providence in her favour ; and whether, in 
proportion as that bounty had been liberal, we were to re- 
gard it as an evil to be met with every possible corrective ? 
In our day there is nobody of any school who doubts that 
Burke's view of our trade policy towards Ireland was ac- 
curately, absolutely, and magnificently right. I need not 
repeat the arguments. They made no mark on the Bris- 
tol merchants. Burke boldly told them that he would 
rather run the risk of displeasing than of injuring them. 
They implored him to become their advocate. " I should 
only disgrace myself," he said ; " I should lose the only 
thing which can make such abilities as mine of any use to 
the world now or hereafter. I mean that authority which 
is derived from the opinion that a member speaks the Ian- 



IV.] RELATIONS WITH HIS CONSTITUENTS. 15 

guage of truth and sincerity, and that he is not ready to 
take up or lay down a great political system for the con- 
venience of the hour ; that he is in Parliament to support 
his opinion of the public good, and does not form his opin- 
ion in order to get into Parliament or to continue in it."^ 

A small instalment of humanity to Ireland was not 
more distasteful to the electors of Bristol, than a small 
instalment of toleration to Roman Catholics in England. 
A measure was passed (iTTS) repealing certain iniquitous 
penalties created by an act of William the Third. It is 
needless to say that this rudimentary concession to justice 
and sense was supported by Burke. His voters began to 
believe that those were right who had said that he had 
been bred at Saint Omer's, was a Papist at heart, and a 
Jesuit in disguise. When the time came, summa dies et 
ineluctahile fatum, Burke bore with dignity and temper 
his dismissal from the only independent constituency that 
he ever represented. Years before he had warned a young 
man entering public life to regard and wish well to the 
common people, whom his best instincts and his highest 
duties lead him to love and to serve, but to put as little 
trust in them as in princes. Burke somewhere describes 
an honest public life as carrying on a poor unequal conflict 
against the passions and prejudices of our day, perhaps 
with no better weapons than passions and prejudices of 
our own. 

The six years during which Burke sat in Parliament for 
Bristol saw this conflict carried on under the most des- 
perate circumstances. They were the years of the civil 
war between the English at home and the English in the 
American colonies. George III. and Lord North have been 
made scapegoats for sins which were not exclusively their 
^ Two letters to gentlemen in Bristol^ 1118. 



76 BURKE. [chap. 

own. They were only the organs and representatives of 
all the lurking ignorance and arbitrary humours of the en- 
tire community. Burke discloses in many places, that for 
once the King and Parliament did not act without the 
sympathies of the mass. In his famous speech at Bristol, 
in 1780, he v/as rebuking the intolerance of those who 
bitterly taunted him for the support of the measure for 
the relaxation of the Penal Code. " It is but too true," 
he said in a passage worth remembering, " that the love, 
and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely 
rare. It is but too true that there are many whose whole 
scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness, and 
insolence. They feel themselves in a state of thraldom ; 
they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, 
unless they have some man, or some body of men, depend- 
ent on their mercy. The desire of having some one below 
them descends to those who are the very lowest of all ; 
and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but ex- 
alted by his share of the ruling church, feels a pride in 
knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose 
footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain 
from a gaol. This disposition is the true source of the 
passion which many men, in very humble life, have taken 
to the American war. Our subjects in America ; our 
colonies; our dependents. This lust of party power is 
the liberty they hunger and thirst for ; and this Siren 
song of ambition has charmed ears that we would have 
thought were never organized to that sort of music." 

This was the mental attitude of a majority of the nation, 
and it was fortunate for them and for us that the yeomen 
and merchants on the other side of the Atlantic had a 
more just and energetic appreciatiou of the crisis. The 
insurgents, while achieving their own freedom, were indi- 



IV.] THE AMERICAN WAR. 77 

rectly engaged in fighting the battle of the people of the 
mother country as well. Burke had a vehement corre- 
spondent who wrote to him (1111) that if the utter ruin 
of this country were to be the consequence of her persist- 
inn; in the claim to tax America, then he would be the first 
to say, Let her perish ! If England prevails, said Horace 
Walpole, English and American liberty is at an end ; if 
one fell, the other would fall with it. Burke, seeing this, 
" certainly never could and never did wish," as he says of 
himself, " the colonists to be subdued by arms. He was 
fully persuaded that if such should be the event, they must 
be held in that subdued state by a great body of standing 
forces, and perhaps of foreign forces. He was strongly of 
opinion that such armies, first victorious over Englishmen, 
in a conflict for English constitutional rights and priv- 
ileges, and afterwards habituated (though in America) to 
keep an English people in a state of abject subjection, 
would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England 
itself."^ The way for this remote peril was being sedu- 
lously prepared by a widespread deterioration among pop- 
ular ideas, and a fatal relaxation of the hold which they 
had previously gained in the public mind. In order to 
prove that the Americans had no right to their liberties, 
we were every day endeavouring to subvert the maxims 
which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove 
that the Americans ought not to be free, we were obliged 
to depreciate the value of freedom itself. The material 
strength of the Government, and its moral strength alike, 
would have been reinforced by the defeat of the colonists, 
to such an extent as to have seriously delayed or even 
jeopardized English progress, and therefore that of Europe 
too. As events actually fell out, the ferocious administra- 
* Appeal from, the new to the old Whigs. 



78 BURKE. [chap. 

tion of the law in the last five or six years of the eigh- 
teenth century, was the retribution for the lethargy or ap- 
proval with which the mass of the English community had 
watched the measures of the government against their fel- 
low-Englishmen in America. 

It is not necessary here to follow Burke minutely 
through the successive stages of parliamentary action in 
the American war. He always defended the settlement of 
1766 ; the Stamp Act was repealed, and the constitutional 
supremacy and sovereign authority of the mother country 
was preserved in a Declaratory Act. When the project 
of taxing the colonies was revived, and relations with them 
were becoming strained and dangerous, Burke came for- 
ward with a plan for leaving the General Assemblies of 
the colonies to grant supplies and aids, instead of giving 
and granting supplies in Parliament, to be raised and paid 
in the colonies. Needless to say that it was rejected, and 
perhaps it was not feasible. Henceforth Burke could only 
watch in impotence the blunders of government, and the 
disasters that befell the national arms. But his protests 
against the war will last as long as our literature. 

Of all Burke's writings none are so fit to secure unqual- 
ified and unanimous admiration as the three pieces on this 
momentous struggle: the Speech on American Taxation 
(April 19, 1774) ; the Speech on Conciliation with Amer- 
ica (March 22, 1775); and the Letter to the Sheriffs of 
Bristol (1777). Together they hardly exceed the compass 
of the little volume which the reader now has in his hands. 
It is no exaggeration to say that they compose the most 
perfect manual in our literature, or in any literature, for 
one who approaches the study of public affairs, whether 
for knowledge or for practice. They are an example with- 
out fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether a 



IV.] THE AMERICAN WAR. '79 

theorist or an actor, of great political situations sliould 
strive by night and by day to possess. If the subject with 
which they deal were less near than it is to our interests 
and affections as free citizens, these three performances 
would still abound in the lessons of an incomparable polit- 
ical method. If their subject were as remote as the quar- 
rel between the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war be- 
tween Rome and the Allies, instead of a conflict to which 
the world owes the opportunity of the most important of 
political experiments, we should still have everything to 
learn from the author's treatment; the vigorous grasp of 
masses of compressed detail, the wide illumination from 
great principles of human experience, the strong and mas- 
culine feeling for the two great political ends of Justice 
and Freedom, the large and generous interpretation of ex- 
pediency, the morality, the vision, the noble temper. If 
ever, in the fulness of time — and surely the fates of men 
and literature cannot have it otherwise — Burke becomes one 
of the half-dozen names of established and universal cur- 
rency in education and in common books, rising above the 
waywardness of literary caprice or intellectual fashions, as 
Shakespere and Milton and Bacon rise above it, it will be 
the mastery, the elevation, the wisdom, of these far-shining 
discourses in which the world will in an especial degree 
recognize the combination of sovereign gifts with benefi- 
cent uses. 

The pamphlet on the Present Discontents is partially 
obscured or muffled to the modern reader by the space 
which is given to the cabal of the day. The Reflections 
on the French Revolution over-abounds in declamation, and 
— apart from its being passionately on one side, and that 
perhaps the wrong one — the splendour of the eloquence is 
out of proportion to the reason and the judgment. In the 



80 BUKKE. [chap. 

pieces on the American war, on tlie contrary, Burke was 
conscious that he could trust nothing to the sympathy or 
the prepossessions of his readers, and this put him upon an 
unwonted persuasiveness. Here it is reason and judgment, 
not declamation ; lucidity, not passion ; that produces the 
effects of eloquence. No choler mars the page ; no purple 
patch distracts our minds from the penetrating force of the 
argument ; no commonplace is dressed up into a vague sub- 
limity. The cause of freedom is made to wear its own 
proper robe of equity, self-control, and reasonableness. 

Not one, but all those great Idols of the political market- 
place whose worship and service has cost the race so dear, 
are discovered and sbown to be the foolish uncouth stocks 
and stones that they are. Fox once urged members of 
parliament to peruse the speech on Conciliation again and 
again, to study it, to imprint it on their minds, to impress 
it on their hearts. But Fox only referred to the lesson 
which he thought to be contained in it, that representa- 
tion is the sovereign remedy for every evil. This is by 
far the least important of its lessons. It is great in many 
ways. It is greatest as a remonstrance and an answer 
against the thriving sophisms of barbarous national pride, 
the eternal fallacies of war and conquest ; and here it is 
great, as all the three pieces on the subject are so, because 
they expose with unanswerable force the deep-lying faults 
of heart and temper, as well as of understanding, which 
move nations to haughty and violent courses. 

The great argument with those of the war party who 
pretended to a political defence of their position was the 
doctrine that the English government was sovereign in the 
colonies as at home ; and in the notion of sovereignty they 
found inherent the notion of an indefeasible right to im- 
pose and exact taxes. Having satisfied themselves of the 



IV.] THE AMERICAN WAR. 81 

existence of this sovereignty, and of the right which they 
took to be its natural property, they saw no step between 
the existence of an abstract right and the propriety of en- 
forcing it. "We have seen an instance of a similar mode of 
political thinking in our own lifetime. During the great 
civil war between the Northern and Southern States of the 
American Union, people in England convinced themselves 
— some after careful examination of documents, others by. 
cursory glances at second-hand authorities — that the South 
had a right to secede. The current of opinion was pre- 
cisely similar in the struggle to which the United States 
owed their separate existence. Now the idea of a right as 
a mysterious and reverend abstraction, to be worshipped in 
a state of naked divorce from expediency and convenience, 
was one that Burke's political judgment found preposter- 
ous and unendurable. He hated the arbitrary and despotic 
savour which clung about the English assumptions over 
the colonies. And his repulsion was heightened when he 
found that these assumptions were justified, not by some 
permanent advantage which their victory would procure 
for the mother country or for the colonies, or which would 
repay the cost of gaining such a victory ; not by the asser- 
tion and demonstration of some positive duty, but by the 
futile and meaningless doctrine that we had a right to do 
something or other, if we liked. 

The alleged compromise of the national dignity implied 
in a withdrawal of the just claim of the government, in- 
stead of convincing, only exasperated him. "Show the 
thing you contend for to be reason ; show it to be com- 
mon-sense ; show it to be the means of attaining some use- 
ful end ; and then I am content to allow it what dignity 
you please."^ The next year he took up the ground still 
' Speech on American Taxation. 



82 BUEKE. [chap. 

more firmly, and explained it still more impressively. As 
for the question of the right of taxation, he exclaimed, 
" It is less than nothing in ray consideration. . . . My con- 
sideration is narrow, confined, and wholly limited to the 
policy of the question. I do not examine whether the 
giving away a man's money be a power excepted and re- 
served out of the general trust of Government. . . . The 
question with me is not whether you have a right to ren- 
der your people miserable, but whether it is not your inter- 
est to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me 
I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I 
ought to do. I am not determining a point of law ; I am 
restoring tranquillity, and the general character and situa- 
tion of a people must determine what sort of government 
is fitted for them." " I am not here going into the dis- 
tinctions of rights," he cries, "not attempting to mark 
their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical 
distinctions. / hate the very sound of them. This is the 
true touchstone of all theories which regard man and the 
affairs of man : does it suit his nature in general ? does it 
suit his nature as modified by his habits ?" He could not 
bear to think of having legislative or political arrange- 
ments shaped or vindicated by a delusive geometrical ac- 
curacy of deduction, instead of being entrusted to " the 
natural operation of things, which, left to themselves, gen- 
erally fall into their proper order." 

Apart from his incessant assertion of the principle that 
man acts from adequate motives relative to his interests, 
and not on metaphysical speculations, Burke sows, as he 
marches along in his stately argument, many a germ of 
the modern philosophy of civilization. He was told that 
America was worth fighting for. " Certainly it is," he 
answered, " if fighting a people be the best way of gaining 



IV.] THE AMERICAN WAR. 83 

them." Every step that has been taken in the direction 
of progress, not merely in empire, but in education, in 
punishment, in the treatment of the insane, has shown the 
deep wisdom, so unfamiliar in that age of ferocious penal- 
ties and brutal methods, of this truth — that " the natural 
effect of fidelity, clemency, kindness in governors, is peace, 
good-will, order, and esteem in the governed." Is there a 
single instance to the contrary ? Then there is that sure 
key to wise politics: '"''Nobody shall persuade me, when 
a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not 
means of conciliation.^^ And that still more famous sen- 
tence, "/ do not know the method of drawing up an indict- 
ment against a whole peopled 

Good and observant men will feel that no misty benev- 
olence or vague sympathy, but the positive reality of ex- 
perience, inspired such passages as that where he says, 
" Never expecting to find perfection in men, and not look- 
ing for divine attributes in created beings, in my com- 
merce with my contemporaries I have found much human 
virtue. The age unquestionably produces daring profli- 
gates and insidious hypocrites? What then? Am I not 
to avail myself of whatever good is to be found in the 
world, because of the mixture of evil that is in it ! ... 
Those who raise suspicions of the good, on account of the 
behaviour of evil men, are of the party of the latter. ... A 
conscientious person would rather doubt his own judg- 
ment, than condemn his species. He that accuses all man- 
kind of corruption, ought to remember that he is sure to 
convict only one. In truth, I should much rather admit 
those whom at any time I have disrelished the most, to be 
patterns of perfection, than seek a consolation to my own 
un worthiness in a general communion of depravity with 
all about rae." This is one of those pieces of rational 



84 BUKKE. [chap. iv. 

constancy and mental wholeness in Burke, which fill up 
our admiration for him — one of the manifold illustrations 
of an invincible fidelity to the natural order and operation 
of things, even when they seemed most hostile to all that 
was dear to his own personality. 



CHAPTER V. 

ECONOMICAL REFORM BURKE IN OFFICE FALL OF HIS 

PARTY. 

Towards 1780 it began to be clear tbat the ministers 
had brought the country into disaster and humiliation, 
from which their policy contained no way of escape. In 
the closing months of the American war, the Opposition 
pressed ministers with a vigour that never abated. Lord 
North bore their attacks with perfect good - humour. 
When Burke, in the course of a great oration, parodied 
Burgoyne's invitation to the Indians to repair to the 
King's standard, the wit and satire of it almost suffo- 
cated the prime minister, not with shame but with laugh- 
ter. His heart had long ceased to be in the matter, and 
everybody knew that he only retained his post in obe- 
dience to the urgent importunities of the King, whilst 
such colleagues as Rigby only clung to their place because 
the salaries were endeared by long familiarity. The gen- 
eral gloom was accidentally deepened by that hideous out- 
break of fanaticism and violence, which is known as the 
Lord George Gordon Riots (June, 1780). The Whigs, as 
having favoured the relaxation of the laws against pop- 
ery, were especially obnoxious to the mob. The govern- 
ment sent a guard of soldiers to protect Burke's house in 
Charles Street, St. James's ; but, after he had removed the 
more important of his papers, he insisted on the guard 



86 BURKE. [chap. 

being dispatched for the protection of mo^re important 
places, and he took shelter under the roof of General Bur- 
goyne. His excellent wife, according to a letter of his 
brother, had " the firmness and sweetness of an angel ; 
y but why do I say of an angel? — of a w'oman." Burke 
himself courageously walked to and fro amid the raging 
crowds with firm composure, though the experiment was 
full of peril. He describes the mob as being made up, as 
London mobs generally are, rather of the unruly and dis- 
solute than of fanatical malignants, and he vehemently 
opposed any concessions by Parliament to the spirit of 
mtolerance which had first kindled the blaze. All the 
letters of the time show that the outrages and alarms of 
those days and nights, in which the capital seemed to be 
at the mercy of a furious rabble, made a deeper impres- 
sion on the minds of contemporaries than they ought to 
have d )ne. Burke was not likely to be less excited than 
others by the sight of such insensate disorder; and it is 
no idle fancy that he had the mobs of 1780 still in his 
memory, when ten years later he poured out the vials of 
his wrath on the bloodier mob which carried the King 
and Queen of France in wild triumph from Versailles to 
Paris. 

In the previous February (1780) Burke had achieved 
one of the greatest of all his parliamentary and oratorical 
successes. Though the matter of this particular enter- 
prise is no longer alive, yet it illustrates his many strong 
qualities in so remarkable a way that it is right to give 
some account of it. We have already seen that Burke 
steadily set his face against parliamentary reform ; he ha-, 
bitually declared that the machine was w^ell enough to 
answer any good purpose, provided the materials were 
sound. The statesman who resists all projects for the 



T.] ECONOMICAL REFORM. 87 

reform of the constitution, and yet eagerly proclaims how 
deplorably imperfect are the practical results of its work- 
ins:, binds himself to vi2;orons exertions for the amend- 
ment of administration. Burke devoted himself to this 
duty with a fervid assiduity that has not often been ex- 
am pled, and has never been surpassed. He went to work 
with the zealof a religious enthusiast, intent on purging 
his church and his faith of the corruptions which lowered 
it in the eyes of men. There was no part or order of 
government so obscure, so remote, or so complex, as to 
escape his acute and persevering observation. 

Burke's object, in his schemes for Economical Reform, 
was less to husband the public resources and relieve the 
tax-payer — though this aim could not have been absent 
from his mind, overburdened as England then was with 
the charges of the American war — than to cut off the 
channels which supplied the corruption of the House of 
Commons. The full title of the first project which he 
presented to the legislature (February, 1780), was A Plan 
for the Better Security of the Independence of Parlia- 
ment, and the Economical Reformation of the Civil and 
other Establishments. It was to the former that he deem- 
ed the latter to be the most direct road. The strength 
of the administration in the House was due to the gifts 
which the Minister had in his hands to dispense. Men 
voted with the side which could reward their fidelity. It 
was the number of sinecure places and unpublished pen- 
sions which, along with the controllable influence of peers 
and nabobs, furnished the Minister with an irresistible 
lever: the avarice and the degraded public spirit of the 
recipients supplied the required fulcrum. Burke knew 
that in sweeping away these factitious places and secret 
pensions, he would be robbing the Court of its chief im- 



88 BUKKE. [chap. 

plements of corruption, and protecting the representative 
against his chief motive in selling his country. He con- 
ceived that he would thus be promoting a far more infal- 
lible means than any scheme of electoral reform could 
have provided, for reviving the integrity and indepen- 
dence of the House of Commons. In his eyes, the evil 
resided not in the constituencies, but in their representa- 
tives ; not in the small number of the one, but in the 
smaller integrity of the other. 

The evil did not stop where it began. It was not mere- 
ly that the sinister motive, thus engendered in the minds 
of too lax and facile men, induced them to betray their 
legislative trust, and barter their own uprightness and the 
interests of the State. The acquisition of one of these ne- 
farious bribes meant much more than a sinister vote. It 
called into existence a champion of every inveterate abuse 
that weighed on the resources of the country. There is a 
well-knojvn passage in the speech on Economical Reform, 
in which the speaker shows what an insurmountable obsta- 
cle Lord Talbot had found in his attempt to carry out cer- 
tain reforms in the royal household, in the fact that the 
turnspit of the King's kitchen was a member of Parlia- 
ment. "On that rock his whole adventure split — his 
whole scheme of economy was dashed to pieces ; his de- 
partment became more expensive than ever ; the Civil List 
debt accumulated." Interference with the expenses of the 
household meant interference with the perquisites or fees 
of this legislative turnspit, and the rights of sinecures were 
too sacred to be touched. In comparison with them, it 
counted for nothing that the King's tradesmen went un- 
paid, and became bankrupt ; that the judges were unpaid ; 
that " the justice of the kingdom bent and gave way ; the 
foreign ministers remained inactive and unprovided ; the 



v.] ECONOMICAL REFORM. 89 

system of Europe was dissolved ; the chain of our alliances 
was broken ; all the wheels of Government at home and 
abroad were stopped. The king^s turns2nt tvas a member 
of Parliament.''''^ This office, and numbers of others ex- 
actly like it, existed solely because the House of Commons 
was crowded with venal men. The post of royal scullion 
meant a vote that could be relied upon under every cir- 
cumstance and in all emergencies. And each incumbent y 
of such an office felt his honour and interests concerned in 
the defence of all other offices of the same scandalous de- 
scription. There was thus maintained a strong standing 
army of expensive, lax, and corrupting officials. 

The royal household was a gigantic nest of costly job- 
bery and purposeless profusion. It retained all " the cum- 
brous charge of a Gothic establishment," though all its 
usage and accommodation had " shrunk into the polished 
littleness of modern elegance." The outlay was enormous. 
The expenditure on the court tables only was a thing un- 
fathomable. Waste was the rule in every branch of it. 
There was an office for the Great Wardrobe, another office 
of the Robes, a third of the Groom of the Stole. For 
these three useless offices there were three useless treasur- 
ers. They all laid a heavy burden on the tax-payer, in or- 
der to supply a bribe to the member of Parliament. The 
plain remedy was to annihilate the subordinate treasuries. 
" Take away," was Burke's demand, " the whole establish- 
ment of detail in the household : the Treasurer, the Comp- 
troller, the Cofferer of the Household, the Treasurer of the 

^ The Civil List at this time comprehended a great number of 
charges, such as those of which Burke speaks, that had nothing to 
do with the sovereign personally. They were slowly removed, the 
judicial and diplomatic charges being transferred on the accession 
of William IV. 
5 



90 BUKKE. [chap. 

Chamber, the Master of the Household, the whole Board 
of Green Cloth ; a vast number of subordinate offices in 
the department of the Steward of the Household ; the 
whole establishment of the Great AVardrobe ; the Remov- 
ing Wardrobe ; the Jewel Office ; the Robes ; the Board 
of Works." The abolition of this confused and costly sys- 
tem would not only diminish expense and promote effi- 
ciency ; it would do still more excellent service in destroy- 
ing the roots of parliamentary corruption. "Under other 
governments a question of expense is only a question of 
economy, and it is nothing more ; with us, in every ques- 
tion of expense, there is always a mixture of constitutional 
considerations." 

Places and pensions, though the worst, were not by any 
means the only stumbling-block in the way of pure and 
well-ordered government. The administration of the es- 
tates of the Crown — the Principality, the Duchy of Corn- 
wall, the Duchy of Lancaster, the County Palatine of Ches- 
ter — was an elaborate system of obscure and unprofitable 
expenditure. Wales had to herself eight judges, while no 
more than twelve sufficed to perform the whole business 
of justice in England, a country ten times as large, and a 
hundred times as opulent. Wales, and each of the duch- 
ies, had its own exchequer. Every one of these principali- 
ties, said Burke, has the apparatus of a kingdom, for the 
jurisdiction over a few private estates ; it has the formality 
and charge of the Exchequer of Great Britain, for collect- 
ing the rents of a country squire. They were the field, in 
his expressive phrase, of mock jurisdictions and mimic rev- 
enues, of difficult trifles and laborious fooleries. " It was 
but the other day that that pert factious fellow, the Duke 
of Lancaster, presumed to fly in the face of his liege lord, 
our gracious sovereign — presumed to go to law with the 



v.] ECONOMICAL REFORM. 91 

King. The object is neither your business nor mine. Which 
of the parties got the better I really forget. The material 
point is that the suit cost about 15,000^. But as the Duke 
of Lancaster is but agent of Duke Humphrey, and not 
worth a groat, our sovereign was obliged to pay the costs 
of both." The system which involved these costly absurd- 
ities, Burke proposed entirely to abolish. In the same 
spirit he wished to dispose of the Crown lands and the 
forest lands, which it was for the good of the community, 
not less than of the Crown itself, to throw into the hands 
of private owners. 

One of the most important of these projected reforms, 
and one which its author did not flinch from carrying out 
two years later to his own loss, related to the office of Pay- 
master. This functionary was accustomed to hold large 
balances of the public money in his own hands and for his 
own profit, for long periods, owing to a complex system of 
accounts which was so rigorous as entirel}^ to defeat its 
own object. The Paymaster could not, through the multi- 
plicity of forms and the exaction of impossible conditions, 
get a prompt acquittance. The audit sometimes did not 
take place for years after the accounts were virtually 
closed. Meanwhile, the money accumulated in his hands, 
and its profits were his legitimate perquisite. The first 
Lord Holland, for example, held the balances of his office 
from 1765, when he retired, until 1778, when they were 
audited. During this time he realized, as the interest on 
the use of these balances, nearly two hundred and fifty ^ 
thousand pounds. Burke diverted these enormous gains 
into the coffers of the state. He fixed the Paymaster's 
salary at four thousand pounds a year, and was himself the 
first person who accepted the curtailed income. 

Not the most fervid or brilliant of Burke's pieces, yet 



92 BURKE. [chap. 

the Speech on Economical Reform is certainly not the least 
instructive or impressive of them. It gives a suggestive 
view of the relations existing at that time between the 
House of Commons and the Court. It reveals the narrow 
and unpatriotic spirit of the King and the ministers, who 
could resist proposals so reasonable in themselves, and so 
remedial in their effects, at a time when the nation was 
suffering the heavy and distressing burdens of the most 
disastrous war that our country has ever carried on. It 
is especially interesting as an illustration of its author's 
political capacity. At a moment when committees, and 
petitions, and great county meetings showed how thor- 
oughly the national anger was roused against the existing 
system, Burke came to the front of affairs with a scheme, 
of which the most striking characteristic proved to be that 
it was profoundly temperate. Bent on the extirpation of 
the system, he had no ill-will towards the men who had 
happened to flourish in it. " I never will suffer," he said, 
" any man or description of men to suffer from errors that 
naturally have grown out of the abusive constitution of 
those offices which I propose to regulate. If I cannot re- 
form with equity, I will not reform at all." Exasperated 
as he was by the fruitlessness of his opposition to a policy 
which he detested from the bottom of his soul, it would 
have been little wonderful if he had resorted to every 
weapon of his unrivalled rhetorical armoury, in order to 
discredit and overthrow the whole scheme of government. 
Yet nothing could have been further from his mind than 
any violent or extreme idea of this so-i't. Many years af- 
terwards he took credit to himself less for what he did on 
this occasion, than for what he prevented from being done. 
People were ready for a new modelling of the two Houses 
of Parliament, as well as for grave modifications of the 



v.] ECONOMICAL KEFORM. 93 

Prerogative. Burke resisted this temper unflinchingly. 
" I had," he says, " a state to preserve, as well as a state 
to reform. I had a people to gratify, but not to inflame 
or to mislead." He then recounts without exaggeration 
the pains and caution with which he sought reform, while 
steering clear of innovation. He heaved the lead every 
inch of way he made. It is grievous to think that a man 
who could assume such an attitude at such a time, who 
could give this kind of proof of his skill in the great, the 
difficult, art of governing, only held a fifth -rate office for 
some time less than a twelvemonth. 

The year of the project of Economic Reform (lYSO) is 
usually taken as the date when Burke's influence and re- 
pute were at their height. He had not been tried in the 
fire of official responsibility, and his impetuosity was still 
under a decree of control which not lono- afterwards was 
fatally weakened by an over-mastering irritability of con 
stitution. High as his character was now in the ascend- 
ant, it was in the same year that Burke suffered the sharp 
mortification of losing his seat at Bristol. His speech be- 
fore the election is one of the best known of all his per- 
formances ; and it well deserves to be so, for it is surpassed 
by none in gravity, elevation, and moral dignity. We can 
only wonder that a constituency which could suffer itself 
to be addressed on this high level should have allowed the 
small selfishness of local interest to weigh against such 
wisdom and nobility. But Burke soon found in the course 
of his canvas that he had no chance, arid he declined to 
go to the poll. On the previous day one of his competi- 
tors had fallen down dead. " What shadows we are,'''' said 
Burke, ^^ and what shadows we pursue T^ 

In 1782 Lord North's government came to an end, and 
the King " was pleased," as Lord North quoted with jest- 



94 BURKE. [chap. 

ing irony from the Gazette, to send for Lord Rockingham, 
Charles Fox, and Lord Shelburne. Members could hardly 
believe their own eyes, as they saw Lord North and the 
members of a government whicli had been in place for 
twelve years, now lounging on the opposition benches in 
their great-coats, frocks, and boots, while Fox and Burke 
shone in the full dress that was then worn by ministers, ■ 

and cut unwonted figiires with swords, lace, and hair pow- 
der. Sheridan was made an under-secretary of state, and" 
to the younger Pitt was offered his choice of various mi- 
nor posts, which he haughtily refused. Burke, to whom 
on their own admission the party owed everything, was 
appointed Paymaster of the Forces, witli a salary of four 
thousand pounds a year. His brother, Richard Burke, 
was made Secretary of the Treasury. His son, Richard, 
was named to be his father's deputy at the Pay Oflfice, 
with a salary of five hundred pounds a year. 

This singular exclusion from cabinet oflSce of the most 
powerful genius of the party has naturally given rise to 
abundant criticism ever since. It will be convenient to 
say what there is to be said on this subject, in connexion 
with the events of 1788 (below, p. 136), because there hap- 
pens to exist some useful information about the ministe- 
rial crisis of that year, which sheds a clearer light upon the 
arrano'ements of six years before. Meanwhile it is enough 
to say that Burke himself had most reasonably looked to 
some higher post. There is the distinct note of the hu- 
mility of mortified pride in a letter written in reply to 
some one who had applied to him for a place. " You 
have been misinformed," he says ; " I make no part of 
the ministerial arrano-ement. Somethino; in the official 
line may possibly be thought fit for my measure." Burke 
knew that his position in the country entitled him to 



V.J THE ROCKINGHAM MINISTRY. 95 

something above the official line. In a later year, when 
.he felt himself called upon to defend his pension, he de- 
scribed what his position was in the momentous crisis from 
1*780 to 1782, and Burke's habitual veraciousness forbids 
us to treat the description as in any way exaggerated. 
"By what accident it matters not," he says, "nor upon 
what desert, but just then, and in the midst of that hunt 
of obloquy which has ever pursued me with a full cry 
through life, I had obtained a very full degree of public 
confidence. . . . Nothing to prevent disorder was omitted ; 
when it appeared, nothing to subdue it was left uncoun- 
selled nor unexecuted, as far as I could prevail. At the 
time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, so aided 
and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty 
hand — I do not say I saved my country — I am sure I did 
my country important service. There were few indeed 
that did not at that time acknowledge it — and that time 
was thirteen years ago. It was but one view, that no man 
in the kingdom better deserved an honourable provision 
should be made for him.'" 

We have seen that Burke had fixed the Paymaster's 
salary at four thousand pounds, and had destroyed the ex- 
travagant perquisites. The other economical reforms which 
were actually effected fell short by a long way of those 
which Burke had so industriously devised and so forcibly 
recommended. In 1782, while Burke declined to spare 
his own office, the chief of the cabinet conferred upon 
Barre a pension of over three thousand a year; above ten 
times the amount, as has been said, which, in Lord Rock- 
ingham's own judgment, as expressed in the new Bill, 
ought henceforth to be granted to any one person what- 
ever. This shortcoming, however, does not detract from 
* Letter to a Noble Lord. 



96 BUEKE. [chap. 

Burke's merit. He was not responsible for it. The elo- 
quence, ingenuity, diligence, above all, the sagacity and the 
justice of this great effort of 1780, are none the less wor- 
thy of our admiration and regard because, in 1782, his 
chiefs, partly perhaps out of a newborn deference for the 
feelings of their royal master, showed that the possession 
of office had sensibly cooled the ardent aspirations proper 
to Opposition. 

The events of the twenty months between the resigna- 
tion of Lord North (1782) and the accession of Pitt to the 
office of Prime Minister (December, 1783) mark an im- 
portant crisis in political history, and they mark an impor- 
tant crisis in Burke's career and hopes. Lord Eocking- 
ham had just been three months in office when he died 
(July, 1782). This dissolved the bond that held the two 
sections of the ministry together, and let loose a flood of 
rival ambitions and sharp animosities. Lord Shelburne 
believed himself to have an irresistible claim to the chief 
post in the administration ; among other reasons, because 
he might have had it before Lord Rockingham three 
months earlier, if he had so chosen. The King supported 
him, not from any partiality to his person, but because he 
dreaded and hated Charles Fox. The character of Shel- 
burne is one of the perplexities of the time. His views on 
peace and free trade make him one of the precursors of 
the Manchester School. JSTo minister was so well inform- 
ed as to the threads of policy in foreign countries. He 
was the intimate or the patron of men who now stand oat 
as among the first lights of that time — of Morellet, of 
Priestley, of Bentham. Yet a few months of power seem 
to have disclosed faults of character which left him with- 
out a single political friend, and blighted him with irrepa- 
rable discredit. Fox, who was now the head of the Rock- 



v.] LORD SHELBURNE. 91 

ingham section of the Whigs, had, before the death of the 
late premier, been on the point of refusing to serve any 
longer with Lord Shelburne, and he now very promptly 
refused to serve under him. When Parliament met after 
Rockingham's death, gossips noticed that Fox and Burke 
continued, long after the Speaker had taken the chair, to 
walk backwards and forwards in the Court of Requests, 
engaged in earnest conversation. According to one story, 
Burke was very reluctant to abandon an office whose emol- 
uments were as convenient to him as to his spendthrift 
colleague. According to another and more probable le- 
gend, it was Burke who hurried the rupture, and stimula- 
ted Fox's jealousy of Shelburne. The Duke of Richmond 
disapproved of the secession, and remained in the govern- 
ment. Sheridan also disapproved, but he sacrificed his 
personal conviction to loyalty to Fox. 

If Burke was responsible for the break-up of the gov- 
ernment, then he was the instigator of a blunder that must 
be pronounced not only disastrous but culpable. It low- ^ 
ered the legitimate spirit of party to the nameless spirit of 
faction. The dangers from which the old liberties of the 
realm had just emerged have been described by no one so 
forcibly as by Burke himself. No one was so convinced 
as Burke that the only way of Avithstanding the arbitrary 
and corrupting policy of the Court was to form a strong 
AVhig party. No one knew better than he the sovereign 
importance and the immense difficulty of repairing the 
ruin of the last twelve years by a good peace. The Rock- 
ingham or Foxite section were obviously unable to form 
an effective party with serious expectation of power, un- 
less they had allies. They might, no doubt, from person- 
al dislike to Lord Shelburne, refuse to work under him ; 
but personal dislike could be no excuse for formally and 
5* 



98 BUEKE. [chap. 

violently working against him, when his policy was their 
own, and when its success was recognized by them no less 
than by him as of urgent moment. Instead of either 
working with the other section of their party, or of sup- 
porting from below the gangway that which was the poli- 
cy of both sections, they sought to return to power by 
coalescing with the very man whose criminal subservience 
to the King's will had brought about the catastrophe that 
Shelburne was repairing. Burke must share the blame of 
this famous transaction. He was one of the most furious 
assailants of the new ministry. He poured out a fresh in- 
vective against Lord Shelburne every day. Cynical con- 
temporaries laughed as they saw him in search of more 
and more humiliating parallels, ransacking all literature 
from the Bible and the Roman history down to Mother 
Goose's tales. His passion carried him so far as to breed 
a reaction in those who listened to him. " I think," wrote 
Mason from Yorkshire, where Burke had been on a visit 
to Lord Fitzwilliam in the autumn of 1782, "that Burke's 
mad obloquy against Lord Shelburne, and these insolent 
pamphlets in which he must have had a hand, will do 
more to fix him (Shelburne) in his ofiice than anything 
else." 

This result would have actually followed, for the nation 
was ill pleased at the immoral alliance between the Fox- 
ites and the man whom, if they had been true to their 
opinions a thousand times repeated, they ought at that 
moment to have been impeaching. The Dissenters, who 
had hitherto been his enthusiastic admirers, but who are 
rigid above other men in their demand of political con- 
sistency, lamented Burke's fall in joining the Coalition, as 
Priestley told him many years after, as the fall of a friend 
and a brother. But Shelburne threw away the game. 



v.] THE COALITION. 99 

" His falsehoods," says Horace AValpole, " his flatteries, 
duplicity, insincerity, arrogance, contradictions, neglect of 
his friends, with all the kindred of all these faults, were 
the daily topics of contempt and ridicule; and his folly 
shut his eyes, nor did he perceive that so very rapid a fall 
must have been owing to his own incapacity." This is 
the testimony of a hostile witness. It is borne out, how- 
ever, by a circumstance of striking significance. When 
the King recovered the reins at the end of 1783, not only 
did he send for Pitt instead of for Shelburne, but Pitt 
himself neither invited Shelburne to join him, nor in any 
w^ay ever consulted him then or afterwards, though he 
had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in Shelburne's own 
administration. 

Whatever the causes may have been, the administration 
fell in the spring of 1783. It was succeeded by the mem- 
orable ministry of the Coalition, in which Fox and Lord 
North divided the real power under the nominal lead of 
the Duke of Portland. Members saw Lord North squeezed 
up on the Treasury bench between two men who had a 
year before been daily menacing him with the axe and 
the block ; and it was not North whom they blamed, but 
Burke and Fox. Burke had returned to the Pay Office. 
His first act there was unfortunate. He restored to their 
position two clerks who had been suspended for malversa- 
tion, and against whom proceedings were then pending. 
When attacked for this in the House, he showed an irri- 
tation which would have carried him to gross lengths, if 
Fox and Sheridan had not by main force pulled him down 
into his seat by the tails of his coat. The restoration of 
the clerks was an indefensible error of judgment, and its 
indiscretion was heightened by the kind of defence which 
Burke tried to set up. When we wonder at Burke's ex- 



100 BURKE. [chap. 

elusion from great offices, this case of Powell and Bern- 
bridge should not be forgotten. 

The decisive event in the history of the Coalition Gov- 
ernment was the India Bill. The Reports of the various 
select committees upon Indian affairs — the most important 
of them all, the ninth and eleventh, having been drawn up 
by Burke himself — had shown conclusively that the ex- 
isting system of government was thoroughly corrupt and 
thoroughly inadequate. It is ascertained pretty conclu- 
sively that the bill for replacing that system was conceived 
and drawn by Burke, and that to him belongs whatever 
merit or demerit it might possess. It was Burke who in- 
fected Fox w4th his own ardour, and then, as Moore just- 
ly says, the self-kindling powder of Fox's eloquence threw 
such fire into his defence of the measure, that he forgot, 
and his hearers never found out, that his views were not 
originally and spontaneously his owm. The novelty on 
which the great stress of discussion w^as laid, was that the 
bill withdrew power from the Board of Directors, and vest- 
ed the government for four years in a commission of seven 
persons named in the bill, and not removable by the House. 

Burke was so convinced of the incurable iniquity of the 
Company, so persuaded that it was not only full of abuses, 
but, as he said, one of the most corrupt and destructive 
tyrannies that probably ever existed in the world, as to be 
content with nothing short of the absolute deprivation of 
its power. He avowed himself no lover of names, and 
that he only contended for good government, from what- 
ever quarter it might come. But the idea of good gov- 
ernment coming from the Company he declared to be 
desperate and untenable. This intense animosity, which, 
considering his long and close familiarity with the infa- 
mies of the rule of the Company's servants, was not un- 



v.] FOX'S INDIA BILL. 101 

natural, must be allowed, however, to have blinded hira to 
the grave objections which really existed to his scheme. 
In . the first place, the Bill was indisputably inconsistent 
with the spirit of his revered Constitution. ' For the legis- 
lature to assume the power of naming the members of an 
executive body, was an extraordinary and mischievous in- 
novation. Then, to put patronage, which has been esti- 
mated by a sober authority at about three hundred thou- 
sand pounds a year, into the hands of the House of Com- 
mons, was still more mischievous and still less justifiable. 
AVorst of all, from the point of view of the projectors 
themselves, after a certain time the nomination of the 
Commissioners would fall to the Crown, and this might in 
certain contingencies increase to a most dangerous extent 
the ascendancy of the royal authority. If Burke's measure 
had been carried, moreover, the patronage would have been 
transferred to a body much less competent than the Direct- 
ors to judge of the qualities required in the fulfilment of this 
or that administrative charge. Indian promotion would 
have followed parliamentary and party interest. In the 
hands of the Directors there was at least a partial security, 
in their professional knowledge, and their personal interest 
in the success of their government, that places would not 
be given away on irrelevant considerations. Their system, 
with all its faults, insured the acquisition of a certain con- 
siderable competency in administration, before a servant 
reached an elevation at which he could do much harm. 

Burke defended the bill (December 1, 1Y83) in one of 
the speeches which rank only below his greatest, and it 
contains two or three passages of unsurpassed energy and 
impressiveness. Everybody knows the fine page about 
Fox as the descendant of Henry IV. of France, and the 
happy quotation from Silius Italicus. Every book of Brit- 



102 BUKKE. [chap. 

ish eloquence contains tlie magnificent description of the 
young magistrates who undertake the government and the 
spoliation of India; how, "animated with all the avarice 
of age and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one 
after another, wave after wave ; and there is nothing be- 
fore the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless pros- 
pect of new flights of birds of prey and of passage, with 
appetites continually renewing for a food that is con- 
tinually wasting." How they return home laden with 
spoil ; " their prey is lodged in England ; and the cries of 
India are given to seas and winds, to be blown about, in 
every breaking up. of the monsoon, over a remote and un- 
hearing ocean." How in India all the vices operate by 
which sudden fortune is acquired; while in England are 
often displayed by the same person the virtues which dis- 
pense hereditary wealth, so that "here the manufacturer 
and the husbandman will bless the just and punctual hand 
that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested 
the scanty portion of rice and salt from the peasant of 
Bengal, or wrung from him the very opium in which he 
forgot his oppression and his oppressors." 

No degree of eloquence, however, could avail to repair 
faults alike in structure and in tactics. The whole design 
was a masterpiece of hardihood, miscalculation, and mis- 
management. The combination of interests against the 
bill was instant, and it was indeed formidable. The great 
army of returned nabobs, of directors, of proprietors of 
East India stock, rose up in all its immense force. Every 
member of every corporation that enjoyed privilege by 
charter felt the attack on the Company as if it had been 
a blow directed against himself. The general public had 
no particular passion for purity or good government, and 
the best portion of the public was disgusted with the 



v.] FALL OF THE WHIGS. 103 

Coalition. The King saw his chance. With politic audac- 
ity he put so strong a personal pressure on the peers, that 
they threw out the Bill (December, 1783). It was to no 
purpose that Fox compared the lords to the Janissaries of 
a Turkish Sultan, and the King's letter to Temple to the 
rescript in which Tiberius ordered the upright Sejanus to 
be destroyed. Ministers were dismissed, the young Pitt 
was installed in their place, and the Whigs were ruined. :^ 
As a party, they had a few months of office after Pitt's 
death, but they were excluded from power for half a century. 



CHAPTER yi. 

BURKE AND HIS FRIENDS. 

Though Burke had, at a critical period of his life, definite- 
ly abandoned the career of letters, he never withdrew from 
close intimacy with the groups who still live for us in the 
pages of Boswell, as no other literary group in our history 
lives. Goldsmith's famous li)|es in RetalmUmi show how 
they all deplored that he should to party give up what 
was meant for mankind. They often told one another 
that Edmund Burke was the man whose genius pointed 
him out as the triumphant champion of faith and sound 
philosophy against deism, atheism, and David Hume. 
They loved to see him, as Goldsmith said, wind into his 
subject like a serpent. Everybody felt at the Literary 
Club that he had no superior in knowledge, and in col- 
loquial dialectics only one equal. Garrick was there, and 
of all the names of the time he is the man whom one 
would perhaps most willingly have seen, because the gifts 
which threw not only Englishmen, but Frenchmen like 
Diderot, and Germans like Lichtenberg, into amazement 
and ecstasy, are exactly those gifts which literary descrip- 
tion can do least to reproduce. Burke was one of his 
strongest admirers, and there was no more zealous attend- 
ant at the closing series of performances in which the 
great monarch of the stage abdicated his throne. In the 
last pages that he wrote, Burke refers to his ever dear 



CHAP. VI.] THE LITERARY CIRCLE. 105 

friend Garrick, dead nearly twenty years before, as the first 
of actors, because he was the acutest observer of nature 
that he had ever known. 

Among men who pass for being more serious than 
players, Robertson was often in London society, and he 
attracted Burke by his largeness and breadth. He sent 
a copy of his history of America, and Burke thanked 
him with many stately compliments for having employed 
philosophy to judge of manners, and from manners hav- 
ing drawn new resources of philosophy. Gibbon was 
there, but the bystanders felt what was too crudely ex- 
pressed by Mackintosh, that Gibbon might have been taken 
from a corner of Burke's mind without ever being missed. 
Though Burke and Gibbon constantly met, it is not like- 
ly that, until the Revolution, there was much intimacy be- 
tween them, in spite of the respect which each of them 
mio'ht well have had for the vast knowledo-e of the other. 
When the Decline and Fall was published, Burke read it 
as everybody else did; but he told Reynolds that he dis- 
liked the style, as very affected, mere frippery and tinsel. 
Sir Joshua himself was neither a "man of letters nor a keen 
politician ; but he was full of literary ideas and interests, 
and he was among Burke's warmest and most constant 
friends, following; him with an admiration and reverence 
that even Johnson sometimes thought excessive. The 
reader of Reynolds's famous Discourses will probably share 
the wonder of his contemporaries, that a man whose time 
was so absorbed in the practice of his art should have 
proved himself so excellent a master in the expression of 
some of its principles. Burke was commonly credited 
with a large share in their composition, but the evidence 
goes no further than that Reynolds used to talk them over 
with him. The friendsliin between the pair was full and 



106 BURKE. [chap. 

unalloyed. What Burke admired in the great artist was 
liis sense and his morals, no less than his genius ; and to a 
man of his fervid and excitable temper there was the most 
attractive of all charms in Sir Joshua's placidity, gentle- 
ness, evenness, and the habit, as one of his friends described 
it, of being the same all the year round. When Reynolds 
died in 1792, he appointed- Burke one of his executors, 
and left him a legacy of two thousand pounds, besides 
cancelling a bond of the same amount. 

Johnson, however, is the only member of that illustrious 
company who can profitably be compared with Burke in 
strength and impressiveness of personality, in a large sensi- 
bility at once serious and genial, in brooding care for all 
the fulness of human life. This striking pair were the 
two complements of a single noble and solid type, holding 
tenaciously, in a century of dissolvent speculation, to the 
best ideas of a society that was slowly passing. They 
were powerless to hinder the inevitable transformation. 
One of them did not even dimly foresee it. But both of 
them help us to understand how manliness and reverence, 
strength and tenderness, love of truth and pity for man, 
all flourished under old institutions and old ways of think- 
ing, into which the forces of the time were even then 
silently breathing a new spirit. The friendship between 
Burke and Johnson lasted as long as they lived; and if 
we remember that Johnson was a strong Tory, and de- 
clared that the first Whig was the devil, and habitually 
talked about cursed Whigs and bottomless Whigs, it is 
an extraordinary fact that his relations with the greatest 
Whig writer and politician of his day were marked by a 
cordiality, respect, and admiration that never varied nor 
wavered. "Burke," he said in a well-known passage, "is 
such a man that if you met him for the first time in the 



VI.] BURKE AND DR. JOHNSON. 107 

street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and 
you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five min- 
utes, he'd talk to you in sncli a manner that, when you 
parted, you would say. This is an extraordinary man. He 
is never what we would call humdrum ; never unwilling to 
begin to talk, nor in haste to leave off." That Burke was 
as good a listener as he was a talker, Johnson never would 
allow. *' So desirous is he to talk," he said, " that if one 
is talking at this end of the table, he'll talk to somebody 
at the other end." Johnson was far too good a critic, 
and too honest a man, to assent to a remark of Robert- 
son's, that Burke had wit. " No, sir," said the sage, most 
truly, "he never succeeds there. 'Tis low, 'tis conceit." 
Wit apart, he described Burke as the only man whose 
common conversation corresponded to his general fame in 
the world ; take up whatever topic you might please, he 
was ready to meet you. "When Burke found a seat in 
Parliament, Johnson said, "Now we who know Burke, 
know that he will be one of the first men in the country." 
He did not grudge that Burke should be the first man in 
the House of Commons, for Burke, he said, was always 
the first man everywhere. Once when he was ill, some- 
body mentioned Burke's name. Johnson cried out, " That 
fellow calls forth all my powers ; were I to see Burke 
now it would kill me." 

Burke heartily returned this high appreciation. When 
some flatterer hinted that Johnson had taken more than 
his right share of the evening's talk, Burke said, " Nay, 
it is enough for me to have rung the bell for him." Some 
one else spoke of a successful imitation of Johnson's style. 
Burke with vehemence denied the success: the perform- 
ance, he said, had the pomp, but not the force of the orig- 
inal ; the nodosities of the oak, but not its strength ; the 



108 BURKE. [chap. 

contortions of the sibyl, but none of the inspiration. 
When Burke showed the old sage of Bolt Court over his 
fine house and pleasant gardens at Beaconsfield, Non in- 
video equidem, Johnson said, with placid good-will, miror 
magis. They always parted in the deep and pregnant 
phrase of a sage of our own day, except hi opinion not dis- 
"^ agreeing. In truth, the explanation of the sympathy be- 
tween them is not far to seek. We may well believe that 
Johnson was tacitly alive to the essentially conservative 
spirit of Burke even in his most Whiggish days. And 
Burke penetrated the liberality of mind in a Tory, who 
called out with loud indio-nation that the Irish were in a 
most unnatural state, for there the minority prevailed over 
the majority, and the severity of the persecution exercised by 
the Protestants of Ireland against the Catholics, exceeded 
that of the ten historic persecutions of the Christian Church. 
The parties at Beaconsfield, and the evenings at the 
Turk's Head in Gerard Street, were contemporary with the 
famous days at Holbach's country house at Grandval. 
W^hen we think of the reckless themes that were so reck- 
lessly discussed by Holbach, Diderot, and the rest of that 
indefatigable band, we feel that, as against the French 
philosophic party, an English Tory like Johnson and an 
English Whig like Burke would have found their own 
differences too minute to be worth considering. If the 
group from the Turk's Head could have been transported 
for an afternoon to Grandval, perhaps Johnson would have 
been the less impatient and disgusted of the two. He had 
the capacity of the more genial sort of casuist for playing 
with subjects, even moral subjects, with the freedom, ver- 
satility, and ease that are proper to literature. Burke, on 
the contrary, would not have failed to see, as indeed we 
know that he did not fail to see, that a social pandemo- 



VI.] BURKE AND DR. JOHNSOX. 109 

nium was bein^^ prepared in this intellectual paradise of 
open questions, where God and a future life, marriage and 
the family, every dogma of religion, every prescription of 
morality, and all those mysteries and pieties of human life 
which have been sanctified by the reverence of ages, were 
being busily pulled to pieces, as if they had been toys in 
the hands of a company of sportive children. Even the 
Beggar'' s Opera Burke could not endure to hear praised 
for its wit or its music, because his mind was filled by 
thought of its misplaced levity, and he only saw the mis- 
chief which such a performance tended to do to society. 
It would be hard to defend his judgment in this particular 
case, but it serves to show how Burke was never content 
with the literary point of view, and how ready and vigilant 
he was for effects more profound than those of formal 
criticism. It is true that Johnson was sometimes not less 
austere in condemning a great work of art for its bad 
morality. The only time when he was really angry with 
Hannah More was on his finding that she had read Tom 
Jones — that vicious book, he called it ; he hardly knew a 
more corrupt work. Burke's tendency towards severity 
of moral judgment, however, never impaired the geniality 
and tenderness of his relations with those whom he loved. 
Bennet Langton gave Boswell an affecting account of 
Burke's last interview with Johnson. A few days before 
the old man's death, Burke and four or five other friends 
were sitting round his bedside. " Mr. Burke said to him, 
* I am afraid, sir, such a number of us may be oppressive 
to you.' ' No, sir,' said Johnson, ' it is not so ; and I must 
be in a wretched state, indeed, when your company is not 
a delight to me.' Mr. Burke, in a tremulous voice, expres- 
sive of being very tenderly affected, replied, ' My dear sir, 
you have always been too good to me.' Immediately af- 



110 BURKE. [chap. 

terwards he went away. This was the last circumstance 
in the acquaintance of these two eminent men." r 

One of Burke's strongest political intimacies was only- 
less interesting and significant than his friendship with 
Johnson. "William Dowdeswell had been Chancellor of 
the Exchequer in the short Rockingham administration of 
1765. He had no brilliant gifts, but he had what was 
then thought a profound knowledge both of the principles 
and details of the administration of the national revenue. 
He was industrious, steadfast, clear-headed, inexorably up- 
right. " Immersed in the greatest affairs," as Burke said 
in his epitaph, " he never lost the ancient, native, genuine, 
English character of a country gentleman." And this 
was the character in which Burke now and always saw 
not only the true political barrier against despotism on 
the one hand and the rabble on the other, but the best 
moral type of civic virtue. Those who admire Burke, but 
cannot share his admiration for the country gentleman, 
will perhaps justify him by the assumption that he clothed 
his favourite with ideal qualities which ought, even if they 
did not, to have belonged to that position. 

In his own modest imitation and in his own humble 
scale, he was a pattern of the activity in public duty, the 
hospitality towards friends, the assiduous protection of 
neglected worth, which ought to be among the chief virt- 
ues of high station. It would perhaps be doubly unsafe 
to take for granted that many of our readers have both 
turned over the pages of Crabbe's Borough, and carried 
away in their minds from that moderately affecting poem, 
the description of Eusebius — 

That pious moralist, that reasoning saint ! 
Can I of worth hke thine, Eusebius, speak ? 
The man is willing, but the muse is weak. 



Ti.] CRABBE. Ill 

Eusebius is intended for Burke, and the portrait is a lit- 
erary tribute for more substantial services. When Crabbe 
came up from his native Aldborough, with three pounds 
and a case of surgical instruments in his trunk, he fondly 
believed that a great patron would be found to watch over 
his transformation from an unsuccessful apothecary into a 
popular poet. He wrote to Lord North and Lord Shel- 
burne, but they did not answer his letters ; booksellers re- 
turned his copious manuscripts ; the three pounds gradu- 
ally disappeared ; the surgical instruments went to the 
pawnbroker's ; and the poet found himself an outcast on 
the world, without a friend, without employment, and 
without bread. He owed money for his lodging, and was 
on the very eve of being sent to prison, when it occurred 
to him to write to Burke. It Avas the moment (1781) 
when the final struggle with Lord North was at its fiercest, 
and Burke might have been absolved if, in the stress of 
conflict, he had neglected a begging-letter. As it was, the 
manliness and simplicity of Crabbe's application touched 
him. He immediately made an appointment with the 
young poet, and convinced himself of his worth. He not 
only relieved Crabbe's immediate distress with a sum of 
money that, as we know, came from no affluence of his 
own, but carried him off to Beaconsfield, installed him 
there as a member of the family, and took as much pains 
to 'find a printer for The Librcuy and The Village, as if 
they had been his own poems. In time he persuaded the 
Bishop of Norwich to admit Crabbe, in spite of his want 
of a regular qualification, to holy orders. He then com- 
mended him to the notice of Lord Chancellor Thurlow. 
Crabbe found the Tiger less formidable than his terrifying 
reputation, for Thurlow at their first interview presented 
him with a hundred-pound note, and afterwards gave him 



112 BURKE. [chap. 

a living. The living was of no great value, it is true ; and 
it was Burke who, with untiring friendship, succeeded in 
procuring something like a substantial position for him, by 
inducing the Duke of Rutland to make the young parson 
his chaplain. Henceforth Crabbe's career was assured, and 
he never forgot to revere and bless the man to whose gen- 
erous hand he owed his deliverance. 

Another of Burke's clients, of whom we hardly know 
whether to say that he is more or less known to our age 
than Crabbe, is Barry, a painter of disputable eminence. 
The son of a seafarer at Cork, he had been introduced to 
Burke in Dublin in 1762, was brought over to England by 
him, introduced to some kind of employment, and finally 
sent, with funds provided by the Burkes, to study art on 
the Continent. It was characteristic of Burke's willing- 
ness not only to supply money, but, what is a far rarer 
form of kindness, to take active trouble, that he should 
have followed the raw student witli long and careful let- 
ters of advice upon the proper direction of his studies. 
For five years Barry was maintained abroad by the Burkes. 
Most unhappily for himself, he was cursed with an irritable 
and perverse temper, and he lacked even the elementary 
arts of conduct. Burke was generous to the end, with 
that difficult and uncommon kind of generosity which 
moves independently of gratitude or ingratitude in the 
receiver. 

From his earliest days Burke had been the eager friend 
of people in distress. While he was still a student at the 
Temple, or a writer for the booksellers, he picked up a 
curious creature in the park, in such unpromising circum- 
stances that he could not forbear to take him under his 
instant protection. This was Joseph Emin, the Armenian, 
who had come to Europe from India with strange heroic 



VI.] BARRY, EMIN, AND BROCKLESBY. 113 

ideas in his head as to the deliverance of his countrymen. 
Burke instantly urged him to accept the few shillings that 
he happened to have in his purse, and seems to have found 
employment for him as a copyist, until fortune brought 
other openings to the singular adventurer. For foreign 
visitors Burke had always a singular considerateness. 
Two Brahmins came to England as agents of Ragonaut 
Rao, and at first underwent intolerable things rather from 
the ignorance than the unkindness of our countrymen. 
Burke no sooner found out what was passing, than he car- 
ried them down to Beaconsfield, and as it was summer- 
time he gave them for their separate use a spacious gar- 
den-house, where they were free to prepare their food and 
perform the rites as their religion prescribed. Nothing 
was so certain to command his fervid sympathy as strict 
adherence to the rules and ceremonies of an ancient and 
sacred ordering. 

If he never failed to perform the offices to which we 
are bound by the common sympathy of men, it is satis- 
factory to think that Burke in return received a measure 
of these friendly services. Among those who loved him 
best was Doctor Brocklesby, the tender physician who 
watched and soothed the last hours of Johnson. When we 
remember how Burke's soul was harassed by private cares, 
chagrined by the untoward course of public events, and 
mortified by neglect from friends no less than by virulent 
reproach from foes, it makes us feel very kindly towards 
Brocklesby, to read what he wrote to Burke in 1788 : 

My very dear friend, — 

My veneration of your public conduct for many years past, and 
my real affection for j^our private virtues and transcendent worth, 
made me yesterday take a liberty Avith you in a moment's conversa- 
tion at my house, to make you an instant present of 1000/., which for 
6 



114 BURKE. [chap. 

years past I had by will destined as a testimony of my regard on 
my decease. This you modestly desired me not to think* of ; but I 
told you what I now repeat, that unfavoured as I have lived for a 
long life, unnoticed professionally by any party of men, and though 
unknown at court, I am rich enough to spare to virtue (what others 
waste in vice) the above sum, and still reserve an annual income 
greater than I spend. I shall receive at the India House a bill I 
have discounted for lOOOl. on the 4th of next month, and then shall 
be happy that you will accept this proof of my sincere love and es- 
teem, and let me add, Si res ampla domi similisque affedibtis esset, I 
should be happy to repeat the like every year." 

The mere transcription of tlie friendly man's good letter 
has something of the effect of an exercise of religion. And 
it was only one of a series of kind acts on the part of the 
same generous giver. 

It is always interesting in the case of a great man to 
know how he affected the women of his acquaintance. 
AVomen do not usually judge character either so kindly or 
so soundly as men do, for they lack that knowledge of the 
ordeals of practical life, whicli gives both justice and char- 
ity to such verdicts. But they are more susceptible than 
most men are to devotion and nobility in character. The 
little group of the blue-stockings of the day regarded the 
great master of knowledge and eloquence with mixed feel- 
ings. They felt for Burke the adoring reverence which 
women offer, with too indiscriminate a trust, to men of 
commandmg power. In his case it was the moral lofti- 
ness of his character that inspired them, as much as the 
splendour of his ability. Of Sheridan or of Fox they 
could not bear to hear; of Burke they could not hear 
enough. Hannali More, and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, the 
learned translator of Epictetus, and Fanny Burney, the au- 
thor of Evelina and Cecilia, were all proud of his notice, 
even while they glowed with anger at his sympathy with 



VI.] HANNAH MORE AND FKANCES BURNEY. 115 

American rebels, his unkind words about the King, and his 
cruel persecution of poor Mr. Hastings. It was at Mrs. 
Yesey's evening parties, given on the Tuesdays on which 
the Club dined at the Turk's Head, that he often had long 
chats with Hannah More. She had to forget what she 
called his political malefactions, before she could allow her- 
self to admire his high spirits and good -humour. This 
was after the events of the Coalition, and her Memoirs, 
like the change in the mind of the Dissenters towards 
Burke, show what a fall that act of faction was believed 
to mark in his character. When he was rejected for Bris- 
tol, she moralized on the catastrophe by the quaint reflec- 
tion that Providence has wisely contrived to render all its 
dispensations equal, by making those talents which set one 
man so much above another of no esteem in the opinion 
of those who are without them. 

Miss Burney has described her flutter of spirits when 
she first found herself in company with Burke (1782). It 
was at Sir. Joshua's house on the top of Richmond Hill, 
and she tells, with her usual effusion, how she was im- 
pressed by Burke's noble figure and commanding air, his 
penetrating and sonorous voice, his eloquent and copious 
language, the infinite variety and rapidity of his discourse. 
Burke had something to say on every subject, from bits 
of personal gossip, up to the sweet and melting landscape 
that lay in all its beauty before their windows on the ter- 
race. He was playful, serious, fantastic, wise. When they 
next met, the great man completed his conquest by ex- 
pressing his admiration of Evelina. Gibbon assured her 
that he had read the whole five volumes in a day ; but 
Burke declared the feat was impossible, for he had himself 
read it through without interruption, and it had cost him 
three days. He showed his regard for the authoress in a 



116 BURKE. [chap. 

more substantial way tlian by compliments and criticism. 
His last act, before going out of office, in 1783, was to 
procure for Dr. Burney tlie appointment of organist at the 
cliapel of Chelsea. 

We have spoken of tlie dislike of these excellent women 
for Sheridan and Fox. In Sheridan's case Burke did not 
much disagree with them. Their characters were as un- 
like and as antipathetic as those of two men could be ; 
and to antipathy of temperament was probably added a 
kind of rivalry, which may justly have affected one of 
them with an irritated humiliation. Sheridan was twenty 
years younger than Burke, and did not come into Parlia- 
ment until Burke had fought the prolonged battle of the 
American war, and had achieved the victory of Economic 
Reform. Yet Sheridan was immediately taken up by the 
party, and became the intimate and counsellor of Charles 
Fox, its leader, and of the Prince of Wales, its patron. 
That Burke never failed to do full justice to Sheridan's 
brilliant genius, or to bestow generous and unaffected 
praise on his oratorical successes, there is ample evidence. 
He was of far too high and veracious a nature to be ca- 
pable of the disparaging tricks of a poor jealousy. The 
humiliation lay in the fact that circumstances had placed 
Sheridan in a position which made it natural for the world 
to measure them with one another. Burke could no more 
like Sheridan than he could like the Beggar's 0]jera. 
Sheridan had a levity, a want of depth, a laxity, and dis- 
persion of feeling, to which no degree of intellectual brill- 
iancy could reconcile a man of such profound moral en- 
ergy and social conviction as Burke. 

The thought will perhaps occur to the reader that Fox 
was not less lax than Sheridan, and yet for Fox Burke 
long had the sincerest friendship. He was dissolute, in- 



Ti.] SHERIDAN AND FOX. IIY 

dolent, irregular, and tlie most insensate gambler tliat ever 
squandered fortune after fortune over the faro-table. It 
■svas liis vices as much as his politics, that made George 
III. hate Fox as an English Catiline. How came Burke 
to accept a man of this character, first for his disciple, 
then for his friend, and next for his leader ? The answer 
is a simple one. In spite of the disorders of his life. Fox, 
from the time when his acquaintance with Burke began, 
down to the time when it came to such disastrous end, 
and for long years afterwards, was to the bottom of his- 
heart as passionate for freedom, justice, and beneficence as 
Burke ever was. These great ends were as real, as con- 
stant, as overmastering in Fox as they were in Burke. 
Kg man was ever more deeply imbued with the generous 
impulses of great statesmanship, with chivalrous courage, 
with the magnificent spirit of devotion to high imposing 
causes. These qualities, we may be sure, and not his pow- 
er as a debater and as a declaimer, won for him in Burke's 
heart the admiration which found such splendid expres- 
sion in a passage, that will remain as a stock piece of dec- 
lamation for long generations after it was first poured out 
as a sincere tribute of reverence and affection. Precisians, 
like Lafayette, might choose to see their patriotic hopes 
ruined rather than have them saved by Mirabeau, because 
Mirabeau was a debauchee. Burke's public morality was 
of stouter stuff, and he loved Fox because he knew that 
under the stains and blemishes that had been left by a 
deplorable education was that sterling, inexhaustible ore 
in which noble sympathies are subtly compounded with 
resplendent powers. 

If he was warmly attached to his political friends, 
Burke, at least before the Revolution, was usually on fair 
terms in private life with his political opponents. There 



118 BURKE. [chap. 

were few men whose policy he disliked more than he dis- 
liked the policy of George Grenville. And we have seen 
that he criticized Grenville in a pamphlet which did not 
spare him. Yet Grenville and he did not refuse one an- 
other's hospitality, and were on the best terms to the very 
end. Wilberf orce, again, was one of the staunchest friends 
of Pitt, and fought one of the greatest electioneering bat- 
tles on Pitt's side in the struggle of 1784; but it made 
no difference in Burke's relations with him. In 1787 a 
coldness arose between them. Burke had delivered a 
strong invective against the French Treaty. "VVilberforce 
said, "We can make allowance for the honourable gen- 
tleman, because we remember him in better days." The 
retort greatly nettled Burke, but the feeling soon passed 
away, and they both found a special satisfaction in the 
dinner to which Wilberforce invited Burke every session. 
" He was a great man," says "Wilberforce. " I could nev- 
er understand how at one time he grew to be so entirely 
neglected." 

Outside of both political and literary circles, among 
Burke's correspondents was that wise and honest traveller 
whose name is as inseparably bound up with the prepara- 
tion of the French Revolution, as Burke's is bound up 
with its sanguinary climax and fulfilment. Arthur Young, 
by his Farmer's Letters, and Farmer's Calendar, and his 
account of his travels in the southern counties of England 
and elsewhere — the story of the more famous travels in 
France was not published until 1792 — had won a reputa- 
tion as the best-informed agriculturist of his day. With- 
in a year of his settlement at Beaconsfield, we find Burke 
writing to consult Young on the mysteries of his new oc- 
cupation. The reader may smile as he recognizes the 
ardour, the earnestness, the fervid gravity of the political 



VI.] AT BEACOXSFIELD. 119 

speeches, in letters which discuss the merits of carrots in 
fattening porkers, and the precise degree to which they 
should be boiled. Burke throws himself just as eagerly 
into white peas and Indian corn, into cabbages that grow 
into head and cabbages that shoot into leaves, into experi- 
ments with pumpkin seed and wild parsnip, as if they had 
been details of the Stamp Act, or justice to Ireland. AVhen 
he complains that it is scarcely possible for him, with his 
numerous avocations, to get his servants to enter fully into 
his views as to the right treatment of his crops, we can 
easily understand that his farming did not help him to 
make money. It is impossible that he should have had 
time or attention to spare for the effectual direction of 
even a small farm. 

Yet if the farm brought scantier profit than it ought to 
have brought, it was probably no weak solace in the back- 
ground of a life of harassing interests and perpetual dis- 
appointments. Burke was happier at Beaconsfield than 
anywhere else, and he was happiest there when his house 
was full of guests. Nothing pleased him better than to 
drive a visitor over to Windsor, where he would expatiate 
with enthusiasm " on the proud Keep, rising in the maj- 
esty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its 
kindred and coeval towers, overseeing and guarding the 
subjected land." He delighted to point out the house 
at Uxbrido;e where Charles I. had carried on the neo-otia- 
tions with the Parliamentary Commissioners ; the beauti- 
ful grounds of Bulstrode, where Judge Jefferies had once 
lived; and the church-yard of Beaconsfield, where lay the 
remains of Edmund Waller, the poet. He was fond of 
talking of great statesmen — of AValpole, of Pulteney, and 
of Chatham. Some one had said that Chatham knew 
nothing whatever except Spenser's Faevy Queen. " No 



120 BURKE. [chap. ti. 

matter how tliat was said," Burke replied to one of his 
visitors, " whoever relishes and reads Spenser as he ought 
to be read, will have a strong hold of the JEnglish lan- 
guage." The delight of the host must have been at least 
equalled by the delight of the guest in conversation which 
was thus ever taldng new turns, branching into topical sur- 
prises, and at all turns and on every topic was luminous, 
high, edifying, full. 

No guest was more welcome than the friend of his boy- 
hood; and Richard Shacldeton has told how the friend- 
ship, cordiality, and openness with which Burke embraced 
him was even more than mighit be expected from long love. 
The simple Quaker was confused by the sight of what 
seemed to him so sumptuous and worldly a life, and he 
went to rest uneasily, doubting whether God's blessing 
could go with it. But when he awoke on the morrow of 
his first visit, he told his wife, in the language of his sect, 
how glad he was " to find no condemnation ; but on the 
contrary, ability to put up fervent petitions with much 
tenderness on behalf of this great luminary." It is at his 
country home that we like best to think of Burke. It is 
still a touching picture to the^ historic imagination to fol- 
low him from the heat and violence of the House, where 
tipsy squires derided the greatest genius of his time, down 
to the calm shades of Beaconsfield, where he would with 
his own hands give food to a starving beggar, or medicine 
to a peasant sick of the ague ; where he would talk of the 
weather, the turnips, and the hay with the team-men and 
the farm-bailiff ; and where, in the evening stillness, he 
would pace the walk under the trees, and reflect on the 
state of Europe and the distractions of his country. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE NEW MINISTRY "WARREN HASTINGS BURKe's PUBLIC 

POSITION. 

The six years which followed the destruction of the Coali- 
tion were, in some respects, the most mortifying portion 
of Burke's troubled career. Pitt was more firmly seated 
in power than Lord North had ever been, and he used his 
power to carry out a policy against which it was impossi- 
ble for the Whigs, on their own principles, to offer an ef- 
fective resistance. For this is the peculiarity of the King's 
first victory over the enemies who had done obstinate bat- 
tle with him for nearly a quarter of a century. He had 
driven them out of the field, but with the aid of an ally 
who was as strongly hostile to the royal system as they 
had ever been. The King l^ad vindicated his right against 
the Whigs to choose his own ministers ; but the new min- 
ister was himself a Whig by descent, and a reformer by 
his education and personal disposition. 

Ireland was the subject of the first great battle between 
the ministry and their opponents. Here, if anywhere, we 
might have expected from Burke at least his usual wisdom 
and patience. We saw in a previous chapter (p. 23) what 
the political condition of Ireland was when Burke went 
there with Hamilton in 1763. The American war had 
brought about a great change. The King had shrewdly 
predicted that if America became free, Ireland would soon 
6* 



122 BL^KKE. [chap. 

follow the same plan and be a separate state. In fact, 
along witli the American war we had to encounter an Irish 
"war also ; but the latter was, as an Irish politician called 
it at the time, a smothered war. Like the Americans, the 
Anglo-Irish entered into non-importation compacts, and 
they interdicted commerce. The Irish volunteers, first 
forty, then sixty, and at last a hundred thousand strong, 
were virtually an army enrolled to overawe the English 
ministry and Parliament. Following the spirit, if not the 
actual path, of the Americans, they raised a cry for com- 
mercial and legislative independence. They were too 
strong to be resisted, and in 1782 the Irish Parliament ac- 
quired the privilege of initiating and conducting its own 
business, without the sanction or control either of the 
Privy Council or of the English Parliament. Dazzled by 
the chance of acquiring legislative independence, they had 
been content with the comparatively small commercial 
boons obtained by Lord Nugent and Burke in 1778, and 
with the removal of further restrictions by the alarmed 
minister in the following year. After the concession of 
their independence in 1782, they found that to procure 
the abolition of the remainino- restrictions on their com- 
merce — the right of trade, for instance, with America and 
Africa — the consent of the English legislature was as nec- 
essary as it had ever been. Pitt, fresh from the teaching 
of Adam Smith and of Shelburne, brought forward in 
1785 his famous commercial propositions. The theory of 
his scheme was that Irish trade should be free, and that 
Ireland should be admitted to a permanent participation 
in commercial advantages. In return for this gain, after 
her hereditary revenue passed a certain point, she was to 
devote the surplus to purposes, such as the maintenance 
of the navy, in which the two nations had a common in- 



vn.J PITT'S IRISH PROPOSITIONS. 123 

terest. Pitt was to be believed when he declared that, of 
all the objects of his political life, this was, in his opinion, 
the most important that he had ever engaged in, and he 
never expected to meet another that should rouse every 
emotion in so strono- a deo-ree as this. 

A furious battle took place in the Irish Parliament. 
There, while nobody could deny that the eleven proposi- 
tions would benefit the mercantile interests of the coun- 
try, it was passionately urged that the last of the propo- 
sitions, that which concerned' the apportionment of Irish 
revenue to imperial purposes, meant the enslavement of 
their unhappy island. Their fetters, they went on, were 
clenched, if the English Government was to be allowed 
thus to take the initiative in Irish legislation. The fac- 
tious course pursued by the English Opposition was much 
less excusable than the line of the Anglo -Irish leaders. 
Fox, Avho was ostentatiously ignorant of political econ- 
omy, led the charge. He insisted that Pitt's measures 
w^ould annihilate English trade, would destroy the Navi- 
gation Laws, and with them would bring our maritime 
strength to the ground. Having thus won the favour of 
the English manufacturers, he turned round to the Irish 
Opposition, and conciliated them by declaring with equal 
vehemence that the propositions were an insult to Ireland, 
and a nefarious attempt to tamper with her new-born lib- 
erties. Burke followed his leader. We may almost say 
that for once he allowed his political integrity to be be- 
wildered. In 1778 and 1779 he had firmly resisted the 
pressure Avhich his mercantile constituents in Bristol had 
endeavoured to put upon him ; he had warmly supported 
the Irish claims, and had lost his seat in consequence. 
The precise ground which he took up in 1785 was this. 
He appears to have discerned in Pitt's proposals the germ 



124 BURKE. [chap. 

of an attempt to extract revenue from Ireland, identical in 
purpose, principle, and probable effect with tlie ever-mem- 
orable attempt to extract revenue from tbe American Col- 
onies. Whatever stress may be laid upon this, we find it 
hard to vindicate Burke from the charge of factiousness. 
Nothing can have been more unworthy of him than the 
sneer at Pitt in the great speech on the Nabob of Arcot's 
debts (1785), for stopping to pick up chaff and straws 
from the Irish revenue, instead of checking profligate ex- 
penditure in India. 

Pitt's alternative was irresistible. Situated as Ireland 
was, she must either be the subservient instrument of 
English prosperity, or else she must be allowed to enjoy 
the benefits of English trade, taking at the same time 
a proportionate share of the common burdens. Adam 
Smith had shown that there was nothing incompatible 
with justice in a contribution by Ireland to the public 
debt of Great Britain. That debt, he argued, had been 
contracted in support of the government established by 
the Revolution ; a government to which the Protestants 
of Ireland owed not only the whole authority which they 
enjoyed in their own country, but every security which 
they possessed for their liberty, property, and religion. 
The neio;hbourhood of Ireland to the shores of the mother 
country introduced an element into the problem, which 
must have taught every unimpassioned observer that the 
American solution would be inadequate for a dependency 
that lay at our very door. Burke could not, in his calmer 
moments, have failed to recognize all this. Yet he lent 
himself to the party cry that Pitt was taking his first 
measures for the re-enslavement of Ireland. Had it not 
been for what he himself called the delirium of the pre- 
ceding session, and w^hich had still not subsided, he would 



VII.] INDIAN AFFAIRS. 125 

Lave seen that Pitt was in truth taking his first measures 
for the effective deliverance of Ireland from an unjust 
and oppressive subordination. The same delirium commit- 
ted him to another equally deplorable perversity, -svhen he 
opposed, with as many excesses in temper as fallacies in 
statesmanship, the wise treaty with France, in which Pitt 
partially anticipated the commercial policy of an ampler 
treaty three-quarters of a century afterwards. 

A great episode in Burke's career now opened. It was 
in 1785 that Warren Hastings returned from India, after 
a series of exploits as momentous and far-reaching, for 
good or evil, as have ever been achieved by any English 
ruler. For years Burke had been watching India. With 
rising wonder, amazement,- and indignation he had steadily 
followed that long train of intrigue and crime which had 
ended in the consolidation of a new empire. AVith the 
return of Hastings he felt that the time had come for 
striking a severe blow and making a signal example. He 
gave notice (June, 1785) that he would, at a future day, 
make a motion respecting the conduct of a gentleman just 
returned from India. 

Among minor considerations, we have to remember that 
Indian affairs entered materially into the great battle of 
parties. It was upon an Indian bill that the late ministry 
had made shipwreck. It w^as notoriously by the aid of po- 
tent Indian interests that the new ministry had acquired 
a portion of its majority. To expose the misdeeds of 
our agents in India was at once to strike the minister 
who had dexterously secured their support, and to at- 
tack one of the great strongholds of parliamentary cor- 
ruption. The proceedings against Hastings were, in the 
first instance, regarded as a sequel to the struggle over 
Fox's East India Bill. That these considerations were 



126 liUKKE, [chap. 

present in Burke's thouglit there is no doubt, but they 
were purely secondary. It was India itself that stood 
above all else in his imagination. It had filled his mind 
and absorbed his time while Pitt was still an under-gradu- 
ate at Cambrido-e, and Burke was lookino; forward to match 
his plan of economic reform with a greater plan of Indian 
reform. In the Ninth Report, the Eleventh Report, and 
in his speech on the India Bill of 1783, he had shown both 
how thoroughly he had mastered the facts, and how pro- 
foundly they had stirred his sense of wrong. The master- 
piece known as the Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's debts, 
delivered in Parliament on a motion for papers (1785), 
handles matters of account, of interest turned into princi- 
pal, and principal superadded to principal ; it deals with 
a hundred minute technicalities of teeps and tuncaws, of 
gomastahs and soucaring ; all with such a suffusion of in- 
terest and colour, with such nobility of idea and expres- 
sion, as could only have come from the addition to genius 
of a deep morality of nature and an overwhelming force 
of conviction. A space less than one of these pages con- 
tains such a picture of the devastation of the Carnatic by 
Hyder Ali as may fill the young orator or the young 
writer with the same emotions of enthusiasm, emulation, 
and despair that torment the artist who first gazes on the 
Madonna at Dresden, or the figures of Night and Dawn 
and the Penseroso at Florence. The despair is only too 
well founded. No conscious study could pierce the secret 
of that just and pathetic transition from the havoc of 
Hyder Ali to the healing duties of a virtuous government, 
to the consolatory celebration of the mysteries of justice 
and humanity, to the warning to the unlawful creditors to 
silence their inauspicious tongues in presence of the holy 
work of restoration, to the generous proclamation against 



VII.] NATURE OF BURKE'S SENSIBILITY. 127 

them that in every country the first creditor is the plough . 
The emotions which make the hidden force of such pict- 
ures come not by observation. They grow from the sed- 
ulous meditation of long years, directed by a powerful in- 
tellect and inspired by an interest in human well-being, 
which of its own virtue bore the orator into the sustainino- 
air of the upper gods. Concentrated passion and exhaust- 
ive knowledge have never entered into a more formidable 
combination. Yet, when Burke made his speech on the 
Nabob of Arcot's debts, Pitt and Grenville consulted to- 
gether whether it was worth ansvrering, and came to the 
conclusion that they need not take the trouble. 

Neither the scornful neglect of his opponents, nor the 
dissuasions of some who sat on his own side, could check 
the ardour with which Burke pressed on, as he said, to the 
relief of afflicted nations. The fact is, that Burke was not 
at all a philanthropist as Clarkson and Wilberforce were 
philanthropists. His sympathy was too strongly under 
the control of true political reason. In 1780, for instance, 
the slave-trade had attracted his attention, and he had even 
proceeded to sketch out a code of regulations which pro- 
vided for its immediate mitigation and ultimate suppres- 
sion. After mature consideration he abandoned the at- 
tempt, from the conviction that the strength of the West 
India interest would defeat the utmost efforts of his party. 
And he was quite right in refusing to hope from any po- 
litical action what could only be effected after the moral 
preparation of the bulk of the nation. And direct moral 
or philanthropic apostleship was not his function. 

Macaulay, in a famous passage of dazzling lustre and 
fine historic colour, describes Burke's holy rage against the 
misdeeds of Hastings as due to his sensibility. But sensi- 
bility to what ? Not merely to those common impressions 



y/ 



128 BURKE. [chap. 

of hum an suffering "which, kindle the flame of ordinary 
philanthropy, always attractive, often so beneficent, but 
often so capricious and so laden with secret detriment. 
This was no part of Burke's type. Nor is it enough to 
say that Burke liad what is the distinctive mark of the 
true statesman — a passion for good, wise, and orderly gov- 
ernment. He had that in the strongest degree. All that 
Avore the look of confusion he held in abhorrence, and he 
detected the seeds of confusion with a penetration that 
made other men marvel. He was far too wise a man to 
have any sympathy wdth the energetic exercise of power 
for power's sake. He knew well that triumphs of violence 
are for the most part little better than temporary make- 
shifts, which leave all the work of government to be en- 
countered afterwards by men of essentially greater capacity 
than the hero of force without scruple. But he regarded 
those whom he called the great bad men of the old stamp, 
Cromwell, Kichelieu, the Guises, the Oondes, with a cer- 
tain tolerance, because " though the virtues of such men 
were not to be taken as a balance to their crimes, yet they 
had long views, and sanctified their ambition by aiming at 
the orderly rule, and not the destruction of their country." 
What he valued was the deep-seated order of systems that 
Avorked by the accepted uses, opinions, beliefs, prejudices 
of a community. 

This love of right and stable order was not all. That 
was itself the growth from a deeper root, partly of convic- 
tion and partly of sympathy ; the conviction of the rare 
and difficult conjunctures of circumstance which are need- 
ed for the formation of even the rudest forms of social 
union among mankind ; and then the sympathy that the 
best men must always find it hard to withhold from any 
hoary fabric of belief, and any venerated system of gov- 



Til.] NATURE OF BURKE'S SENSIBILITY. 129 

ernment, tliat has cherished a certain order, and shed even 
a ray of the faintest dawn, among the violences and the 
darkness of the race. It was reverence rather than sensi- 
bility, a noble and philosophic conservatism rather than 
philanthropy, which raised that storm in Burke's breast 
against the rapacity of English adventurers in India, and 
the imperial crimes of Hastings. Exactly the same tide of 
emotion which afterwards filled to the brim the cup of 
prophetic anger against the desecrators of the church and 
the monarchy of France, now poured itself out against 
those who in India had "tossed about, subverted and tore 
to pieces, as if it were in the gambols of boyish unlucki- 
ness and malice, the most established rights, and the most 
ancient and most revered institutions of ages and nations." 
From beginning to end of the fourteen years in which 
Burke pursued his campaign against Hastings, we see in 
every page that the India which ever glowed before his 
vision was not the home of picturesque usages and melo- 
dramatic costume, but rather, in his own words, the land 
of princes once of great dignity, authority, and opulence ; 
of an ancient and venerable priesthood, the guides of the 
people while living, and their consolation in death ; of a 
nobility of antiquity and renown ; of millions of ingenious 
mechanics, and millions of diligent tillers of the earth ; and 
finally, the land where might be found almost all the re- 
ligions professed by men — the Brahminical, the Mussul- 
man, the Eastern and the AVestern Christian. When he 
published his speech on the Nabob of Arcot, Burke pre- 
fixed to it an admirable quotation from one of the letters 
of the Emperor Julian. And Julian too, as we all know, 
had a strong feeling for the past. But what in that re- 
markable figure was only the sentimentalism of reaction, 
in Burke was a reasoned and philosophic veneration for all 



ISO BURKE. ■ [chap. 

old and settled order, whether in the free Parliament of 
Great Britain, in the ancient absolutism of Versailles, or in 
the secular pomp of Oude, and the inviolable sanctity of 
Benares, the holy city and the garden of God. 

It would be out of place here to attempt to follow the 
details of the impeachment. Every reader has heard that 
great tale in our history, and everybody knows that it was 
Burke's tenacity and power which caused that tale to be 
told. The House of Commons would not, it is true, have 
directed that Hastings should be impeached, unless Pitt 
had given his sanction and approval, and how it was that 
Pitt did give his sanction and approval so suddenly and 
on grounds ostensibly so slender, remains one of the se- 
crets of history. In no case would the impeachment have 
been pressed upon Parliament by the Opposition, and as- 
sented to by ministers, if Burke had not been there with 
his prodigious industry, his commanding comprehensive 
vision, his burning zeal, and his power of kindling in men 
so different from him and from one another as Fox, Sher- 
idan, Windham, Grey, a zeal only less intense than his 
own. 

It was in the spring of 1786 that the articles of charge 
of Hastings's high crimes and misdemeanours, as Burke 
had drawn them, were presented to the House of Commons. 
It was in February, 1788, that Burke opened the vast 
cause in the old historic hall at Westminster, in an oration 
in which at points he was wound up to such a pitch of 
eloquence and passion that every listener, including the 
great criminal, held his breath in an agony of horror ; that 
women were carried out fainting; that the speaker himself 
became incapable of saying another word, and the specta- 
tors of the scene began to wonder whether he would not, 
like the mighty Chatham, actually die in the exertion of 



\ii.] OPENING OF THE IMPEACHMENT. 131 

his overwhelming powers. Among the illustrious crowd 
-who thronged Westminster Hall in the opening days of 
the impeachment, was Fanny Burney. She was then in 
her odious bondage at Court, and was animated by that 
admiration and pity for Hastings which at Court was the 
fashion. Windham used to come up from the box of the 
managers of the impeachment to talk over with her the 
incidents of the day, and she gave him her impressions of 
Burke's speech, Avhich w^ere probably those of the majority 
of his hearers, for the majority were favourable to Has- 
tings. " I told him," says Miss Burney, " that Mr. Burke's 
opening had struck me with the highest admiration of his 
powers, from the eloquence, the imagination, the fire, the 
diversity of expression, and the ready flow of language 
with which he seemed gifted, in a most superior manner, 
for any and every purpose to which rhetoric could lead." 
"And when he came to his two narratives," I continued, 
" when he related the particulars of those dreadful mur- 
ders, he interested, he engaged, he at last overpowered me ; 
I felt my cause lost. I could hardly keep on my seat. 
My eyes dreaded a single glance towards a man so accused 
as Mr. Hastings ; I wanted to sink on the floor, that they 
might be saved so painful a sight. I had no hope he 
could clear himself ; not another wish in his favour re- 
mained. But when from this narration Mr. Burke pro- 
ceeded to his own comments and declamation — when the 
charges of rapacity, cruelty, tyranny, were general, and 
made with all the violence of personal detestation, and 
continued and aggravated without any further fact or il- 
lustration ; then there appeared more of study than of 
truth, more of invective than of justice ; and, in short, so 
little of proof to so much of passion, that in a very short 
time I began to lift up my head, my seat was no longer 



132 BURKE. [chap. 

uneasy, my eyes Avere indifferent wliich way they looked, 
or -what object caught them, and before I was myself 
aware of the declension of Mr. Burke's powers over my 
feelings, I found myself a mere spectator in a public place, 
and looking all around it, with my opera -glass in my 
hand !" 

In 1795, six years after Burke's opening, the Lords were 
ready with their verdict. It had long been anticipated. 
Hastings was acquitted. This was the close of the four- 
teen years of labour, from the date of the Select Commit- 
tee of 1781. "If I were to call for a reward," Burke 
said, " it w^ould be for the services in which for fourteen 
years, without intermission, I showed the most industry 
and had the least success. I mean the affairs of India ; 
they are those on which I value myself the most ; most for 
the importance ; most for the labour ; most for the judg- 
ment ; most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit." 

The side that is defeated on a particular issue, is often 
victorious in the wide and general outcome. Looking 
back across the ninety years that divide us from that 
memorable scene in Westminster Hall, we may see that 
Burke had more success than at first appeared. If he did 
not convict the man, he overthrew a system, and stamped 
its principles with lasting censure and shame. Burke had 
perhaps a silent conviction that it wo aid have been better 
for us and for India, if Clive had succeeded in his attempt 
to blow out his own brains in the Madras counting-house, 
or if the battle of Plassy had been a decisive defeat instead 
of a decisive victory. " All these circumstances," he once 
said, in reference to the results of the investigation of the 
Select Committee, " are not, I confess, very favourable to 
the idea of our attempting to govern India at all. But 
there we are : there we are placed by the Sovereign Dis- 



vn.] EFFECT OF THE IMPEACHMENT. 133 

poser, and we must do the best we can in our situation. 
The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty." If 
that situation is better understood now than it was a cen- 
tury ago, and that duty more loftily conceived, the result 
is due, so far as such results can ever be due to one man's 
action apart from the confluence of the deep impersonal 
elements of time, to the seeds of justice and humanity 
which were sown by Burke and his associates. Nobody 
now believes that Clive was justified in tricking Omichund 
by forging another man's name; that Impey was justified 
in hanging Nuncomar for committing the very offence for 
which Clive was excused or applauded, although forgery 
is no grave crime according to Hindoo usage, and it is the 
gravest according to English usage ; that Hastings did 
well in selling English troops to assist in the extermina- 
tion of a brave people with w^hom he was at peace; that 
Benfield did well in conniving with an Eastern prince in 
a project of extortion against his subjects. The whole 
drift of opinion has changed, and it is since the trial of 
Hastings that the change has taken place. The question 
in Burke's time was whether oppression and corruption 
were to continue to be the guiding maxims of English 
policy. The personal disinterestedness of the ruler who 
had been the chief founder of this policy, and had most 
openly set aside all pretence of righteous principle, was 
dust in the balance. It was impossible to suppress the 
policy without striking a deadly blow at its most eminent 
and powerful instrument. That Hastings was acquitted, 
was immaterial. The lesson of his impeachment had been 
taught with sufficiently impressive force — the great lesson 
that Asiatics have rights, and that Europeans have obliga- 
tions ; that a superior race is bound to observe the highest 
current morality of the time in all its dealings with the 



134 BURKE. [chap. 

subject race. Burke is entitled to our lasting reverence as 
the first apostle and great upholder of integrity, mercy, 
and honour in the relation between his countrymen and 
their humble dependents. 

He shared the common fate of those who dare to strike 
a blow for human justice against the prejudices of national 
egotism. But he was no longer able to bear obloquy and 
neglect, as he had borne it through tlie war with the col- 
onies. When he opened the impeachment of Hastings at 
Westminster, Burke was very near to his sixtieth year. 
Hannah More noted in 1786 that his vivacity had dimin- 
ished, and that business and politics had impaired his 
agreeableness. The simpletons in the House, now that 
they had at last found in Pitt a political chief who could 
beat the W'hig leaders on their own ground of eloquence, 
knowledge, and dexterity in debate, took heart as they had 
never done under Lord North. They now made deliberate 
attempts to silence the veteran by unmannerly and brutal 
interruptions, of which a mob of lower class might have 
been ashamed. Then suddenly came a moment of such 
excitement as has not often been seen in the annals of 
party. It became known one day, in the autumn of 1788, 
that the King had gone <5ut of his mind. 

The news naturally caused the liveliest agitation among 
the Whigs. When the severity of the attack forced the 
ministry to make preparations for a Regency, the friends 
of the Prince of Wales assumed that they wonld speedily 
return to power, and hastened to form their plans accord- 
ingly. Fox was travelling in Italy with Mrs. Armitage, 
and he had been two months away without hearing a word 
from England. The Duke of Portland sent a messenger 
in search of him, and after a journey of ten days the mes- 
senger found him at Bologna. Fox instantly set off in all 



VII.] THE KING'S ILLNESS. 135 

haste for London, which he reached in nine days. The 
three months that followed were a time of unsurpassed 
activity and bitterness, and Burke was at least as active 
and as bitter as the rest of them. He was the waiter of 
the Prince of Wales's letter to Pitt, sometimes set down 
to Sheridan, and sometimes to Gilbert Elliot. It makes us 
feel how naturally the style of ideal kingship, its dignity, 
calm, and high self-consciousness all came to Burke. Al- 
though we read of his thus drawing up manifestoes and 
protests, and deciding minor questions for Fox, which Fox 
was too irresolute to decide for himself, yet we have it on 
Burke's own authority that some time elapsed after the 
return to England before he even saw Fox ; that he was 
not consulted as to the course to be pursued in the grave 
and difficult questions connected with the Regency ; and 
that he knew as little of the inside of Carlton House, 
where the Prince of Wales lived, as of Buckingham House, 
where the King lived. " I mean to continue here," he 
says to Charles Fox, " until you call upon me ; and I find 
myself perfectly easy, from the implicit confidence that I 
have in you and the Duke, and the certainty that I am in 
that you two will do the best for the general advantage of 
the cause. In that state of mind I feel no desire what- 
soever of interfering." Yet the letter itself, and others 
which follow, testify to the vehemence of Burke's interest 
in'the matter, and to the persistency with which he would 
have had them follow his judgment, if they would have 
listened. It is as clear that they did not listen. 

Apart from the fierce struggle against Pitt's Regency 
Bill, Burke's friends were intently occupied with the re- 
construction of the Portland cabinet, which the King had 
so unexpectedly dismissed five years before. This was a 
sphere in which Burke's gifts were neither required nor 



136 BURKE. [CHAP. 

sought. We are ratlier in distress, Sir Gilbert Elliot 
writes, for a proper man for tlie office of Cliancellor of 
tlie Exchequer. " Lord J. Cavendish is very unwilling to 
engage again in public affairs. Fox is to be Secretary of 
State. Burke, it is thought, would not be approved of, 
Sheridan has not the public confidence, and so it comes 
down therefore to Grey, Pelham, myself, and perhaps 
Windham." Elliot was one of Burke's most faithful and 
attached friends, and he was intimately concerned in all 
that was going on in the inner circle of the party. It is 
worth while, therefore, to reproduce his account, from a 
confidential letter to Lady Elliot, of the way in which 
Burke's claim to recognition was at this time regarded 
and dealt with. 

Although I can tell you nothing positive about my own situation, 
I was made very happy indeed yesterday by co-operating in the set- 
tlement of Burke's, in a manner which gives us great Joy as well as 
comfort. The Duke of Portland has felt distressed how to arrange 
Burke and his family in a manner equal to Burke's merits, and to 
the Duke's own wishes, and at the same time so as to be exempt 
from the many difficulties Avhich seem to be in the way. He sent 
for Pelham and me, as Burke's friends and his own, to advise with 
us about it ; and we dined yesterday with him and the Duchess, that 
we might have time to talk the thing over at leisure and without in- 
terruption after dinner. "We stayed, accordingly, engaged in that 
subject till almost twelve at night, and our conference ended most 
happily, and excessively to the satisfaction of us all. The Duke of 
Portland has the veneration for Burke that Windham, Pelham, my- 
self, and a few more have, and he thinks it impossible to do too 
much for him. He considers the reward to be given to Burke as a 
credit and honour to the nation, and he considers the neglect of him 
and his embarrassed situation as having been long a reproach to the 
country. The unjust prejudice and clamour which has prevailed 
against him and his family only determine the Duke the more to do 
him Justice. The question was how ? First, his brother Richard, 
who was Secretary to the Treasury before, Avill have the same office 



VII. J PATvIY ARK.\AGEMENTS. 131 

now, but the Duke intends to give him one of the first offices which 
falls vacant, of about 1000^. a year for life in the Customs, and he 
will then resign the Secretary to the Treasury, which, however, in the 
meanwhile is worth 3000?. a year. Edmund Burke is to have the 
Pay Office, 4000?. a year; but as that is precarious and he can leave 
no provision for his son, it would, in fact, be doing little or nothing 
of any real or substantial value unless some permanent provision is 
added to it. In this view the Duke is to grant him on the Irish es- 
tablishment a pension of 2000?. a year clear for his own life, and the 
other half to Mrs. Burke for her life. This will make Burke com- 
pletely happy, by leaving his wife and son safe from want after his 
death, if they should survive him. The Duke's affectionate anxiety 
to accomplish this object, and his determination to set all clamour at 
defiance on this point of justice, was truly affecting, and increases 
my attachment for the Duke. . . . The Duke said the only objection 
to this plan was that he thought it was due from this country, and 
that he grudged the honour of it to Ireland ; but as nothing in Eng- 
land was ready, this plan was settled. You may think it strange 
that to this moment Burke does not know a word of all this, and his 
family are indeed, I believe, suffering a little under the apprehension 
that he may be neglected in the general scramble. I believe there 
never were three cabinet counsellors more in harmony on any sub- 
ject than we were, nor three people happier in their day's work.^ 

This leaves the apparent puzzle where it was. Why- 
should Burke not be approved of for Chancellor of the 
Exchequer ? What were the many difficulties described as 
seeming to be in the way of arranging for Burke, in a 
manner equal to Burke's merits and the Duke of Port- 
land's wishes ? His personal relations with the chiefs of 
his party were at this time extremely cordial and intimate. 
He was constantly a guest at the Duke of Portland's most 
private dinner-parties. Fox had gone down to Beacons- 
field to recruit himself from the fatigues of his rapid jour- 
ney from Bologna, and to spend some days in quiet with 
Windham and the master of the house. Elliot and Wind- 
* Life and Letters of Sir G. Elliot, i. 261-3. 
1 



138 BURKE. [chap. 

ham, who were talked about for a post for which one of 
them says that Burke would not have been approved, vied 
with one another in adoring Burke. Finally, Elliot and 
the Dake think themselves happy in a day's work which 
ended in consigning the man who not only was, but was 
admitted to be, the most powerful genius of their party, 
to a third-rate post, and that most equivocal distinction, a 
pension on the Irish establishment. The common expla- 
nation that it illustrates Whig exclusiveness cannot be se- 
riously received as adequate. It is probable, for one thing, 
that the feelings of the Prince of AVales had more to do 
with it than the feelings of men like the Duke of Portland 
or Fox. We can easily imagine how little that most 
worthless of human creatures would appreciate the great 
qualities of such a man as Burke. The painful fact which 
we are unable to conceal from ourselves is, that the com- 
mon opinion of better men than the Prince of Wales 
leaned in the same direction. His violence in the course 
of the Regency debates had produced strong disapproval 
in the public and downright consternation in his own par- 
ty. On one occasion he is described by a respectable ob- 
server as having " been wilder than ever, and laid himself 
and his party more open than ever speaker did. He is 
folly personified, but shaking his cap and bells under the 
laurel of genius. He finished his wild speech in a manner 
next to madness." Moore believes that Burke's indiscre- 
tions in these trying and prolonged transactions sowed the 
seeds of the alienation between him and Fox two years af- 
terwards. Burke's excited state of mind showed itself in 
small things as well as great. Going with Windham to 
Carlton House, Burke attacked him in the coach for a dif- 
ference of opinion about the affairs of a friend, and be- 
haved with such unreasonable passion and such furious 



vil] BURKE'S PUBLIC POSITION. 139 

rudeness of manner, that his magnanimous admirer had 
some difficulty in obliterating the impression. The public 
were less tolerant. Windham has told us that at this time 
Burke was a man decried, persecuted, and proscribed, not 
being much valued even by his own party, and by half the 
nation considered as little better than an ingenious mad- 
man.^ This is evidence beyond impeachment, for Wind- 
ham loved and honoured Burke with the affection and rev- 
erence of a son ; and he puts the popular sentiment on 
record with grief and amazement. There is other testi- 
mony to the same effect. The late Lord Lansdowne, who 
must have heard the subject abundantly discussed by those 
who were most concerned in it, was once asked by a very 
eminent man of our own time why the Whigs kept Burke 
out of their cabinets. " Burke I" he cried ; " he was so 
violent, so overbearing, so arrogant, so intractable, that to 
have got on with him in a cabinet would have been utterly 
and absolutely impossible." 

On the whole, it seems to be tolerably clear that the dif- 
ficulties in the way of Burke's promotion to high office 
were his notoriously straitened circumstances ; his ungov- 
erned excesses of party zeal and political passion ; finally, 
what Sir Gilbert Elliot calls the unjust prejudice and clam- 
our against him and his family, and what Burke himself 
once called the hunt of obloquy that pursued him all his 
life. The first two of these causes can scarcely have op- 
erated in the arrangements that were made in the Rock- 
ingham and Coalition ministries. But the third, we may 
be sure, was incessantly at work. It would have needed 
social courage alike in 1782, 1783, and 1788 to give cabi- 
net rank to a man round whose name there floated so 
many disparaging associations. Social courage is exactly 
* Windham's Diary, p. 213. 



140 BURKE. [chap. 

the virtue in which the constructors of a government will 
always think themselves least able to indulge. Burke, we 
have to remember, did not stand alone before the world. 
Elliot describes a dinner-party at Lord Fitzwilliams's, at 
which four of these half -discredited Irishmen were present. 
" Burke has now got such a train after him as w^ould sink 
anybody but himself — his son, who is quite nauseated by 
all mankind ; his brother, who is liked better than his son, 
but is rather offensive with animal spirits and with brogue ; 
and his cousin, Will Burke, who is just returned unexpect- 
edly from India, as much ruined as when he went many 
years ago, and who is a fresh charge on any prospects of 
power that Burke may ever have." It was this train, and 
the ideas of adventurership that clung to them, the inex- 
tinguishable stories about papistry and Saint Omer's, the 
tenacious calumny about the letters of Junius, the notori- 
ous circumstances of embarrassment and neediness — it was 
all these things which combined with Burke's own defects 
of temper and discretion, to give the Whig grandees as de- 
cent a reason as they could have desired for keeping all 
the great posts of state in their own hands. 

It seems difficult to deny that the questions of the Re- 
gency had caused the germs of a sort of dissatisfaction 
and strain in the relations between Fox and Burke. Their 
feelings to one another have been well compared to the 
mutual discontent between partners in unsuccessful play, 
where each suspects that it is the mistakes of the other 
that lost the game. Whether Burke felt conscious of the 
failures in discretion and temper, which were the real or 
pretended excuse for neglect, we cannot tell. There is one 
passage that reveals a chagrin of this kind. A few days 
after the meeting between the Duke of Portland and El- 
liot, for the purpose of settling his place in the new minis- 



vn.] BUKKE'S CHAGRIN. 141 

try, Burke went down to Beaconsfield. In writing (January 
24th, 1789) to invite Windham and Pelham to come to 
stay a night, with promise of a leg of mutton cooked by a 
dairy-maid who was not a bad hand at a pinch, he goes on 
to say that his health has received some small benefit from 
his journey to the country. "But this view to health, 
though far from unnecessary to me, was not the chief 
cause of my present retreat. I began to find that I was 
grown rather too anxious ; and had begun to discover to 
myself and to others a solicitude relative to the present 
state of affairs, which, though their strange condition 
might well warrant it in others, is certainly less suitable 
to my time of life, in which all emotions are less allowed ; 
and to which, most certainly, all human concerns ought in 
reason to become more indifferent, than to those who have 
work to do, and a good deal of day, and of inexhausted 
strength, to do it in."^ 

The King's unexpected restoration to health two or three 
weeks later, brought to nought all the hope and ambition 
of the Whigs, and confirmed Pitt in power for the rest of 
Burke's lifetime. But an event now came to pass in the 
world's history which transformed Burke in an instant 
from a man decried, persecuted, proscribed, into an object 
of exultant adoration all over Europe. 

* Correspondence^ iii. 89. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

We have now come to the second of the two momen- 
tous changes in the world's affairs, in which Burke played 
an imposing and historic part. His attitude in the first of 
them, the struggle for American independence, commands 
almost without alloy the admiration and reverence of pos- 
terity. His attitude in the second of them, the great rev- 
olution in France, has raised controversies which can only 
be compared in heat and duration to the master contro- 
versies of theology. If the history of society were writ- 
ten as learned men write the history of the Christian faith 
and its churches, Burke would figure in the same strong 
prominence, whether deplorable or glorious, as Arius and 
Athanasius, Augustine and Sabellius, Luther and Ignatius. 
If we ask how it is that now, nearly a century after the 
event, men are still discussing Burke's pamphlet on the 
Revolution as they are still discussing Bishop Butler's 
Analogy y the answer is that in one case as in the other the 
questions at issue are still unsettled, and that Burke offers 
in their highest and most comprehensive form all the con- 
siderations that belong to one side of the dispute. He 
was not of those of whom Coleridge said that they pro- 
ceeded with much solemnity to solve the riddle of the 
French Revolution by anecdotes. He suspended it in the 



# 



CHAP.vm.] BURKE'S EARLY DISTRUST. 143 

same light of great social ideas and wide principles, in 
which its authors and champions professed to represent it. 
Unhappily he advanced from criticism to practical exhor- 
tation, in our opinion the most mischievous and indefensi- 
ble that has ever been pressed by any statesman on any 
nation. But the force of the criticism remains, its fore- 
sight remains, its commemoration of valuable elements of 
life which men were forgetting, its discernment of the lim- 
itations of things, its sense of the awful emergencies of the 
problem. When our grandchildren have made up their 
minds, once for all, as to the merits of the social transfor- 
mation which dawned on Europe in 1789, then Burke's 
Reflections will become a mere literary antiquity, and not 
before. 

From the very beginning Burke looked upon the pro- 
ceedings in France with distrust. He had not a moment 
of enthusiasm or sympathy of which to repent. When 
the news reached England that the insurgents of Paris had 
stormed the Bastille, Fox exclaimed with exultation, how 
much it was the greatest event that had ever happened in 
the world, how much the best. Is it an infirmity to wish, 
for an instant, that some such phrase of generous hope had 
escaped from Burke ; that he had for a day or an hour un- 
dergone that fine illusion which was lighted up in the spir- 
its of men like AVordsworth and Coleridge ? Those great 
poets, who were destined one day to preach even a wiser 
and a loftier conservatism than his own, have told us what 
they felt — 

When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared, 
And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea, 
Stamped her strong foot, and said she would be free. 

Burke from the first espied the looming shadow of a 
catastrophe. In August he wrote to Lord Charlemont 



144 BUKKK [chap. 

that tlie events in France had something paradoxical and 
raysterions about them ; that the outbreak of the old Pa- 
risian ferocity might be no more than a sudden explosion, 
but if it should happen to be character rather than acci- 
dent, then the people would need a strong hand like that 
of their former masters to coerce them ; that all depended 
upon the French having wise heads among them, and upon 
these wise heads, if such there were, acquiring an authority 
to match their wisdom. There is nothing here but a calm 
and sagacious suspense of judgment. It soon appeared 
that the old Parisian ferocity was still alive. In the events 
of October, 17 89, when the mob of Paris marched out 
to Yersailles and marched back again with the King and 
Queen in triumphal procession, Burke felt in his heart that 
the beginning of the end had come, and that the catastro- 
phe was already at hand. In October he wrote a long letr 
ter to the French gentleman to whom he afterwards^ a(3- 
dressed the Mejlections. " You hope, sir," he said, " that I 
think the French deserving of libeity. I certainly do. I 
certaiflly think that all men who desire it deserve it. We 
cannot forfeit our right to it, but by what forfeits our title 
to the privileges of our kind. The liberty I mean is soeial 
freedom. It is that state of tjiings in which liberty is se- 
cured by equality of restraint. This kind c^ liberty is,'in- 
deed, but another name for justice. Wkmever a separation 
is made between liberty and, justice, neither is in mP opinion 
safe" The weightiest and most important of all political 
truths, and worth half the fine things that poets have sung 
about* freedom — if it could only have been respected, how 
different the course of the Revolution ! But the engineer 
who attempts to deal with the abysmal rush of the falls 
of Niagara must put aside the tools that constructed the 
Bridge water Canal and the Chelsea Waterworks. Nobody 



% 



vni.] HIS UNIFORM CONSERVATISM. 145 

recognised so early as Burke that France had really em- 
barked among cataracts and boiling gulfs, and the pith 
of all his first criticisms, including the Reflections^ was 
the proposition that to separate freedom from justice was 
nothing else than to steer the ship of state direct into the 
Maelstrom. It is impossible to deny that this was true. 
Unfortunately it was a truth which the wild spirits that 
were then abroad in the storm made of no avail. 

Destiny aimed an evil stroke when Burke, whose whole 
soul was bound up in order, peace, and gently enlarged 
precedent, found himself face to face with the portentous 
man-devouring Sphinx, He, who could not endure that a 
few clergymen should be allowed to subscribe to the Bible 
instead of to the Articles, saw the ancient Church of Chris- 
tendom prostrated, its possessions confiscated, its 'priests 
proscribed, and Christianity itself officially superseded. 
The economical reformer, who when his zeal was hottest 
declined to discharge a tide-waiter or a scullion in the 
royal kitchen, who should have acquired the shadow of a 
vested interest in his post, beheld two great orders stripped 
of their privileges and deprived of much of their lands, 
though their possession had been sanctified by the express 
voice of the laws and the prescription of many centuries. 
He, who was full of apprehension and anger at the pro- 
posal to take away a member of Parliament from St. Mi- 
chael's or Old Sarum, had to look on while the most au- 
gust monarchy in Europe w^as overturned. The man who 
dreaded fanatics, hated atheists, despised political theoris- 
ers, and was driven wild at the notion of applying meta- 
physical rights and abstract doctrines to public affairs, sud- 
denly beheld a whole kingdom given finally np to fanat- 
ics, atheists, and theorisers, who talked of nothing but the 
rights of man, and deliberately set as wide a gulf as ruin 



146 BURKE. [chap. 

and bloodshed could make between themselves and every 
incident or institution in the history of their land. The 
statesman who had once declared, and habitually proved, 
his preference for peace over even truth, who had all his 
life surrounded himself with a mental paradise of order 
and equilibrium, in a moment found himself confronted by 
the stupendous and awful spectre which a century of dis- 
order had raised in its supreme hour. It could not have 
been difficult for any one who had studied Burke's charac- 
ter and career, to foretell all that now came to pass with 
him. 

It was from an English, and not from a French point 
of view, that Burke was first drawn to write upon the 
Revolution. The 4th of November was the anniversary 
of the landing of the Prince of Orange, and the first act 
in the Revolution of 1688. The members of an associa- 
tion which called itself the Revolution Society, chiefly 
composed of Dissenters, but not without a mixture of 
Churchmen, including a few peers and a good many mem- 
bers of the House of Commons, met as usual to hear a 
sermon in commemoration of the glorious day. Dr. 
Price was the preacher, and both in the morning sermon 
and in the speeches which followed in the festivities of 
the afternoon the French were held up to the loudest ad- 
miration, as having carried the principles of our own 
Revolution to a loftier height, and having opened bound- 
less hopes to mankind. By these harmless proceedings 
Burke's anger and scorn were aroused to a pitch which 
must seem to us, as it seemed to not a few of his contem- 
poraries, singularly out of all proportion to its cause. 
Deeper things were doubtless in silent motion within him. 
He set to work upon a denunciation of Price's doctrines, 
with a velocity that reminds us of Aristotle's comparison 



VIII.] ORIGIN OF THE REFLECTIONS. 147 

of anger to the over-hasty servant, who runs off with all 
speed before he has listened to half the message. This 
was the origin of the Reflections. The design grew as the 
writer went on. His imagination took fire ; his memory 
quickened a throng of impressive associations ; his excited 
vision revealed to him a band of vain, petulant upstarts 
persecuting the ministers of a sacred religion, insulting a 
virtuous and innocent sovereign, and covering with hu- 
miliation the august daughter of the Caesars ; his mind 
teemed with the sage maxims of the philosophy of things 
established, and the precepts of the gospel of order. Ev- 
ery courier that crossed the Channel supplied new mate- 
rial to his contempt and his alarm. He condemned the 
whole method and course of the French reforms. His 
judgment was in suspense no more. He no longer dis- 
trusted ; he hated, despised, and began to dread. 

Men soon began to whisper abroad that Burke thought 
ill of what was going on over the water. When it trans- 
pired that he was writing a pamphlet, the world of letters 
was stirred with the liveliest expectation. The name of 
the author, tlie importance of the subject, and the singu- 
larity of his opinions, so Mackintosh informs us, all in- 
flamed the public curiosity. Soon after Parliament met 
for tke session (1790), the army estimates were brought 
up. Fox criticised the increase of our forces, and inci- 
dentally hinted something in praise of the Frencb army, 
which had shown that a man could be a soldier without 
ceasing to be a citizen. Some days afterwards the sub- 
ject was revived, and Pitt, as well as Fox, avowed himself 
hopeful of the good effect of the Revolution upon the or- 
der and government of France. Burke followed in a very 
different vein, openly proclaiming that dislike and fear of 
the Revolution which was to be the one ceaseless refrain of 



148 BUKKE. [char 

all that lie spoke or wrote for tlie rest of his life. He de- 
plored Fox's praise of the army for breaking their lawful 
allegiance, and then he proceeded with ominous words to 
the effect that, if any friend of his should concur in any 
measures which should tend to introduce such a democracy 
as that of France, he would abandon his best friends and 
join with his worst enemies to oppose either the means 
or the end. This has unanimously been pronounced one 
of the most brilliant and effective speeches that Burke 
ever made. Fox rose with distress on every feature, and 
made the often-quoted declaration of his debt to Burke : 
"If all the political information I have learned from 
books, all which I have gained from science, and all which 
my knowledge of the world and its affairs has taught me, 
were put into one scale, and the improvement which I 
have derived from my right honourable friend's instruc- 
tion and conversation were placed in the other, I should 
be at a loss to decide to which to give the preference. I 
have learnt more from my right honourable friend than 
from all the men with whom I ever conversed." All 
seemed likely to end in a spirit of conciliation, until Sheri- 
dan rose, and in the plainest terms that he could find ex- 
pressed his dissent from everything that Burke had said. 
Burke immediately renounced his friendship. For the 
first time in his life he found the sympathy of the House 
vehemently on his side. 

In the following month (March, 1790) this unpromis- 
ing incident was succeeded by an aberration which no ra- 
tional man will now undertake to defend. Fox brought 
forward a motion for the repeal of the Test and Corpora- 
tion Acts. He did this in accordance with a recent sug- 
gestion of Burke's own, that he should strengthen his po- 
litical position by winning the support of the Dissenters. 



Till.] SPEECH ON THE ESTIMATES. 149 

Burke himself had always denounced the Test Act as 
bad, and as an abuse of sacred things. To the amaze- 
ment of everybody, and to the infinite scandal of his par- 
ty, he now pronounced the Dissenters to be disafiEected 
citizens, and refused to relieve them. Well might Fox 
say that Burke's words had filled him with grief and 
shame. 

Meanwhile the great rhetorical fabric gradually arose. 
Burke revised, erased, moderated, strengthened, emphasized, 
wrote and re-wrote with indefatigable industry. With the 
manuscript constantly under his eyes, he lingered busily, 
pen in hand, over paragraphs and phrases, antitheses and 
apophthegms. The Reflections was no superb improvisa- 
tion. Its composition recalls Palma Giovine's account of 
the mighty Titian's way of working; how the master 
made his preparations with resolute strokes of a heavily- 
laden brush, and then turned his picture to the wall, and 
by -and -by resumed again, and then again and again, re- 
dressing, adjusting, modelling the light with a rub of his 
finger, or dabbing a spot of dark colour into some corner 
with a touch of his thumb, and finally working all his 
smirches, contrasts, abruptnesses, into the glorious harmony 
that we know. Burke was so unwearied in this insatiable 
correction and alteration, that the printer found it neces- 
sary, instead of making the changes marked upon the 
proof-sheets, to set up the whole in type afresh. The 
work was upon the easel for exactly a year. It was No- 
vember (1790) before the result came into the hands of 
the public. It was a small octavo of three hundred and 
fifty-six pages, in contents rather less than twice the pres- 
ent volume, bound in an unlettered wrapper of grey paper, 
and sold for five shillings. In less than twelve months it 
reached its eleventh edition, and it has been computed 



150 BURKE. [chap. 

that not many short of thirty thousand copies were sold 
within the next six years. 

The first curiosity had languished in the course of the 
long delay, but it was revived in its strongest force when 
fthe book itself appeared. A remarkable effect instantly 
followed. Before the Reflections was published, the pre- 
dominant sentiment in England had been one of mixed 
astonishment and sympathy. Pitt had expressed this 
common mood both in the House of Commons and in 
private. It was impossible for England not to be amazed 
at the uprising of a nation whom they had been accus- 
tomed to think of as willing slaves, and it was impossible 
for her, when the scene did not happen to be the American 
colonies or Ireland, not to profess good wishes for the 
cause of emancipation all over the world. Apart from 
the natural admiration of a free people for a neighbour 
struggling to be free, England saw no reason to lament a 
blow to a sovereign and a government who had interfered 
on the side of her insurgent colonies. To this easy state 
of mind Burke's book put an immediate end. At once, 
as contemporaries assure us, it divided the nation into two 
parties. On both sides it precipitated opinion. With a 
long-resounding blast on his golden trumpet Burke had 
unfurled a new flag, and half the nation hurried to rally 
to it — that half which had scouted his views on America, 
which had bitterly disliked his plan of Economic Reform, 
which had mocked his ideas on religious toleration, and 
which a moment before had hated and reviled him beyond 
all men living, for his fierce tenacity in the impeachment 
of Warren Hastings. The King said to everybody who 
came near him that the book was a good book, a very 
good book, and every gentleman ought to read it. The 
universities began to think of offering the scarlet gown of 



VIII.] EFFECT OF THE REFLECTIONS. 151 

their most honourable degree to the assailant of Price and 
the Dissenters. The great army of the indolent good, the 
people who lead excellent lives and never use their reason, 
took violent alarm. The timorous, the weak-minded, the 
bigoted, were suddenly awakened to a sense of what they 
owed to themselves. Burke gave them the key which 
enabled them to Interpret the Revolution in harmony with 
their usual ideas and their temperament. 

Reaction quickly rose to a high pitch. One preacher 
in a parish church in the neighbourhood of London cele- 
brated the anniversary of the Restoration of King Charles 
II. by a sermon, in which the pains of eternal damnation 
were confidently promised to political disaffection. Romil- 
ly, mentioning to a friend that the Reflections had got 
into a fourteenth edition, wondered whether Burke was 
not rather ashamed of his success. It is when we come 
to the rank and file of reaction that we find it hard to for- 
give the man of genius who made himself the organ of 
their selfishness, their timidity, and their blindness. We 
know, alas ! that the parts of his writings on French affairs 
to which they would fly were not likely to be the parts 
which calm men now read with sympathy, but the scold- 
ings, the screamings, the unworthy vituperation with which, 
especially in the latest of them, he attacked everybody who 
took part in the Revolution, from Condorcet and Lafay- 
ette down to Marat and Couthon. It was the feet of clay 
that they adored in their image, and not the head of fine 
gold and the breasts and the arms of silver. 

On the continent of Europe the excitement was as great 
among the ruling classes as it was at home. Mirabeau, 
who had made Burke's acquaintance some years before in 
England, and even been his guest at Beaconsfield, now 
made the Reflections the text of more than one tremen- 



152 BURKE. [chap. 

dous philippic. Louis XYI. is said to have translated the 
book into French with his own hand. Catherine of 
Eussia, Voltaire's adored Semirarais of the North, the 
benefactress of Diderot, the ready helper of the philo- 
sophic party, pressed her congratulations on the great 
pontiff of the old order, who now thundered anathema 
against the philosophers and all their works. 

It is important to remember the stage which the Revo- 
lution had reached when Burke was composing his attack 
upon it. The year 1790 was precisely the time when the 
hopes of the best men in France shone most brightly, and 
seemed most reasonable. There had been disorders, and 
Paris still had ferocity in her mien. But Robespierre was 
an obscure figure on the back benches of the Assembly. 
Nobody had ever heard of Danton. The name of Repub- 
lic had never been so much as whispered. The King still 
believed that constitutional monarchy would leave him as 
much power as he desired. He had voluntarily gone to 
the National Assembly, and in simple language had ex- 
horted them air to imitate his example by professing the 
single opinion, the single interest, the single wish — attach- 
ment to the new constitution, and ardent desire for the 
peace and happiness of France. The clergy, it is true, 
were violently irritated by the spoliation of their goods, 
and the nobles had crossed the Rhine, to brood impotent- 
ly in the safety of Coblenz over projects of a bloody re- 
venge upon their country. But France, meanwhile, paid 
little heed either to the anger of the clergy or the menaces 
of the emigrant nobles, and at the very moment when 
Burke was writing his most sombre pages, Paris and the 
provinces were celebrating with transports of joy and en- 
thusiasm the civic oath, the federation, the restoration of 
concord to the land, the final establishment of freedom 



vm.] DATE OF THE REFLECTIONS. 153 

and justice in a regenerated France. This was the happy 
scene over which Burke suddenly stretched out the right 
arm of an inspired prophet, pointing to the cloud of thun- 
der and darkness that was gathering on the hills, and pro* 
claiming to them the doom that had been written upon 
the wall by the fingers of an inexorable hand. It is no 
wonder that when the cloud burst and the doom was ful- 
filled, men turned to Burke, as they went of old to Ahith- 
ophel, whose counsel was as if a man had inquired of the 
oracle of God. 

It is not to our purpose to discuss all the propositions 
advanced in the Reflections^ much less to reply to them. 
The book is like some temple, by whose structure and de- 
sign we allow ourselves to be impressed, without being 
careful to measure the precise truth or fitness of the wor- 
ship to which it was consecrated by its first founders. 
Just as the student of the Politics of Aristotle may well 
accept all the wisdom of it, without caring to protest at 
every turn against slavery as the basis of a society, so we 
may well cherish all the wisdom of the Reflections, at this 
distance of time, without marking as a rubric on every 
page that half of these impressive formulae and inspiring 
declamations were irrelevant to the occasion which called 
them forth, and exercised for the hour an influence that 
was purely mischievous. Time permits to us this profita- 
ble lenity. In reading this, the first of his invectives, it 
is important for the sake of clearness of judgment to put 
from our minds the practical policy which Burke after- 
wards so untiringly urged upon his countrymen. As yet 
there is no exhortation to England to interfere, and we 
still listen to the voice of the statesman, and are not deaf- 
ened by the passionate cries of the preacher of a crusade. 
When Burke wrote the Reflections, he was justified in crit- 



154 BURKE. [chap. 

icising the Revolution as an extraordinary movement, but 
still a movement professing to be conducted on the prin- 
ciples of rational and practicable politics. They were the 
principles to which competent onlookers like Jefferson 
and Morris had expected the Assembly to conform, but to 
which the Assembly never conformed for an instant. It 
was on the principles of rational politics that Fox and 
Sheridan admired it. On these principles Burke con- 
demned it. He declared that the methods of the Constit- 
uent Assembly, up to the summer of 1790, were unjust, 
precipitate, destructive, and without stability. Men had 
chosen to build their house on the sands, and the winds 
and the seas would speedily beat against it and over- 
throw it. 

His prophecy was fulfilled to the letter. What is still 
more important for the credit of his foresight is, that not 
only did his prophecy come true, but it came true for the 
reasons that he had fixed upon. It was, for instance, the 
constitution of the Church, in which Burke saw the worst 
of the many bad mistakes of the Assembly. History, now 
slowly shaking herself free from the passions of a centu- 
ry, agrees that the civil constitution of the clergy was the 
measure which, more than any other, decisively put an end 
to whatever hopes there might have been of a peaceful 
transition from the old order to the new. A still more 
striking piece of foresight is the prediction of the despot- 
ism of the Napoleonic Empire. Burke had compared the 
levelling policy of the Assembly in their geometrical divis- 
ion of the departments, and their isolation from one an- 
other of the bodies of the state, to the treatment which a 
conquered country receives at the hands of its conquerors. 
Like Romans in Greece or ]\Iacedon, the French innovators 
had destroyed the bonds of union, under color of provid- 



VIII.] INSTANCES OF FORESIGHT. 155 

ing for the independence of eacli of their cities. *' If the 
present project of a Republic should fail," Burke said, with 
a prescience really profound, *' all securities to a moder- 
ate freedom fail with it. All the indirect restraints which 
mitigate despotism are removed ; insomuch that, if mon- 
archy should ever again obtain an entire ascendancy in 
France under this or any other dynasty, it will probably 
be, if not voluntarily tempered at setting out by the wise 
and virtuous counsels of the prince, the most completely 
arbitrary power that ever appeared on earth." Almost at 
the same moment Mirabeau was secretly writing to the 
King, that their plan of reducing all citizens to a single 
class would have delighted Richelieu. This equal surface, 
he said, facilitates the exercise of power, and many reigns 
in an absolute government would not have done as much 
as this single year of revolution for the royal authority. 
Time showed that Burke and Mirabeau were right. 

History ratifies nearly all Burke's strictures on the levi- 
ty and precipitancy of the first set of actors in the revo- 
lutionary drama. No part of the Reflections is more en- 
ergetic than the denunciation of geometric and literary 
methods; and these are just what the modern explorer 
hits upon, as one of the fatal secrets of the catastrophe. 
De Tocqueville's chapter on the causes which made literary 
men the principal persons in France, and the effect which 
this had upon the Revolution (Bk. iii. ch. i.), is only a lit- 
tle too cold to be able to pass for Burke's own. Quinet's 
work on the Revolution is one long sermon, full of elo- 
quence and cogency, upon the incapacity and blindness of 
the men who undertook the conduct of a tremendous cri- 
sis upon mere literary methods, without the moral cour- 
age to obey the logic of their beliefs, with the student's 
ignorance of the eager passion and rapid imagination of 



156 BUHKE. [chap. 

multitudes of men, witli the pedant's misappreciation of a 
people, of whom it has been said by one of themselves 
that there never was a nation more led by its sensations, 
and less by its principles. Comte, again, points impres- 
sively to the Kevolution as the period which illustrates 
more decisively than another the peril of confounding the 
two great functions of speculation and political action; 
and he speaks with just reprobation of the preposterous 
idea in the philosophic politicians of the epoch, that so- 
ciety was at their disposal, independent of its past develop- 
ment, devoid of inherent impulses, and easily capable of 
being morally regenerated by the mere modification of leg- 
islative rules. 

What then was it that, in the midst of so much per- 
spicacity as to detail, blinded Burke, at the time when he 
wrote the Reflections^ to the true nature of the movement ? 
Is it not this, that he judges the Revolution as the solu- 
tion of a merely political question? If the Revolution 
had been merely political, his judgment would have been 
adequate. The question was much deeper. It was a so- 
cial question that burned under the surface of what seem- 
ed no more than a modification of external arrangements. 
That Burke was alive to the existence of social problems, 
and that he was even tormented by them, we know from 
an incidental passage in the Reflections. There he tells 
us how often he had reflected, and never reflected without 
feeling, upon the innumerable servile and degrading occu- 
pations to which, by the social economy, so many wretches 
are inevitably doomed. He had pondered whether there 
could be any means of rescuing these unhappy people 
from their miserable industry, without disturbing the natu- 
ral course of things, and impeding the great wheel of cir- 
culation which is turned by their labour. This is the vein 



VIII.] THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 157 

of that striking passage in his first composition, which I 
have already quoted (p. 16). Burke did not yet see, and 
probably never saw, that one key to the events which as- 
tonished and exasperated him, was simply that the per- 
sons most urgently concerned had taken the riddle which 
perplexed him into their own hands, and had in fiery ear- 
nest set about their own deliverance. The pith of the Rev- 
olution, up to 1790, was less the political constitution, of 
which Burke says so much, and so much that is true, but 
the social and economic transformation, of which he says 
so little. It was not a question of the power of the King, 
or the measure of an electoral circumscription, that made 
the Revolution ; it was the iniquitous distribution of the 
taxes, the scourge of the militia service, the scourge of the 
road service, the destructive tyranny exercised in the vast 
preserves of wild game, the vexatious rights and imposts 
of the lords of manors, and all the other odious burdens 
and heavy impediments on the prosperity of the thrifty 
and industrious part of the nation. If he had seen ever 
so clearly that one of the most important sides of the 
Revolution in progress was the rescue of the tiller of the 
soil, Burke would still doubtless have viewed events with 
bitter suspicion. For the process could not be executed 
without disturbing the natural course of things, and with* 
out violating his principle that all changes should find us 
with our minds tenacious of justice and tender of prop- 
erty. A closer examination than he chose to give, of the 
current administration alike of justice and of property 
under the old system, would have explained to him that 
an hour had come in which the spirit of property and of 
justice compelled a supersession of the letter. 

If Burke had insisted on rigidly keeping sensibility to 
the wrongs of the French people out of the discussion, on 



158' BURKE. [chap. 

the ground that the whole subject was one for positive 
knowledge and logical inference, his position would have 
been intelligible and defensible. He followed no such 
course. His pleading turns constantly to arguments from 
feeling ; but it is always to feeling on one side, and to a 
sensibility that is only alive to the concentrated force of 
historic associations. How much pure and uncontrolled 
emotion had to do with what ought to have been the rea- 
soned judgments of his understanding, we know on his 
own evidence. He had sent the proof-sheets of a part of 
his book to Sir Philip Francis. They contained the fa- 
mous passage describing the French Queen as he had seen 
her seventeen years before at Versailles. Francis bluntly 
wrote to him that, in his opinion, all Burke's eloquence 
about Marie Antoinette was no better than pure foppery, 
and he referred to the Queen herself as no better than 
Messaliiia. Burke was so excited by this that his son, in a 
rather officious letter, begged Francis not to repeat such 
stimulating remonstrance. What is interesting in the in- 
cident is Burke's own reply. He knew nothing, he said, 
of the story of Messalina, and declined the obligation of 
proving judicially the virtues of all those whom he saw 
suffering wrong and contumely, before he endeavoured to 
interest others in their sufferings, and before endeavouring 
to kindle horror against midnight assassins at backstairs 
and their more wicked abettors in pulpits. And then he 
went on, " I tell you again that the recollection of the 
manner in which I saw the Queen of France in the year 
1*774 [l773], and the contrast between that brilliancy, 
splendour, and beauty, with the prostrate homage of a 
nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1789 which 
I was describing, did draw tears from me and wetted 
my paper. These tears came again into my eyes al- 



VIII.] HIS SENSIBILITY. 159 

most as often as I looked at the description — they may 
again." 

The answer was obvious. It was well to pity the un- 
merited agonies of Marie Antoinette, though as yet, we 
must remember, she had suffered nothing beyond the in- 
dignities of the days of October at Versailles. But did 
not the protracted agonies of a nation deserve the tribute 
of a tear? As Paine asked, were men to weep over the 
plumage, and forget the dying bird ? The bulk of the 
people must labour, Burke told them, " to obtain what by 
labour can be obtained ; and when they find, as they com- 
monly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour, 
they must be taught their consolation in the final propor- 
tions of eternal justice." When we know that a Lyons 
silk-weaver, working as hard as he could for over seventeen 
hours a day, could not earn money enough to procure the 
most bare and urgent necessaries of subsistence, we may 
know witli what benignity of brow eternal justice must 
have presented herself in the garret of that hapless wretch. 
It was no idle abstraction, no metaphysical right of man, 
for which the French cried, but only tbe practical right of 
being permitted, by their own toil, to save themselves and 
the little ones about their knees from hunger and cruel 
death. The mainmortahle serfs of ecclesiastics are vari- 
ously said to have been a million and a million and a half 
at the time of the Kevolution. Burke's horror, as he 
thought of the priests and prelates who left palaces and 
dignities to earn a scanty living by the drudgery of teach- 
ing their language in strange lands, should have been alle- 
viated by the thought that a million or more of men were 
rescued from ghastly material misery. Are we to be so 
overwhelmed with sorrow over the pitiful destiny of the 
men of exalted rank and sacred function, as to have no 



160 BURKE. [chap. 

tears for the forty thousand serfs in the gorges of the 
/ Jura, who were held in dead-hand by the Bishop of Saint- 
Claude? 

The simple truth is that Burke did not know enough of 
the subject about which he was writing. When he said, 
for instance, that the French before 1789 possessed all the 
elements of a constitution that might be made nearly as 
good as could be wished, he said what many of his con- 
temporaries knew, and what all subsequent investigation 
and meditation have proved, to be recklessly ill-considered 
and untrue. As to the social state of France, his informa- 
tion was still worse. He saw the dano;ers and disorders 
of the new system, but he saw a very little way indeed 
into the more cruel dangers and disorders of the old. 
Mackintosh replied to the Reflections with manliness and 
temperance in the Vindicice GalUcce. Thomas Paine re- 
plied to them with an energy, courage, and eloquence wor- 
thy of his cause, in the Rights of Man. But the substan- 
tial and decisive reply to Burke came from his former 
correspondent, the farmer at Bradfield, in Suffolk. Arthur 
Young published his Travels in France some eighteen 
months after the Reflections (1792), and the pages of the 
twenty-first chapter, in which he closes his performance, 
as a luminous criticism of the most important side of the 
Revolution, are worth a hundred times more than Burke, 
Mackintosh, and Paine all put together. Young after- 
wards became panic-stricken, but his book remained. There 
the writer plainly enumerates without trope or invective 
the intolerable burdens under which the great mass of the 
French people had for long years been groaning. It was 
the removal of these burdens that made the very heart's 
core of the Revolution, and gave to France that new life 
which so soon astonished and terrified Europe. Yet 



I 



VIII.] HIS INSUFFICIENT KNOWLEDGE. 161 

Burke seems profoundly unconscious of the whole of 
them. He even boldly asserts that, when the several or- 
ders met in their bailliages in 1789, to choose their repre- 
sentatives and draw up their grievances and instructions, 
in no one of these instructions did they charge, or even . 
hint at, any of those things which had drawn upon the 
usurping Assembly the detestation of the rational part of 
mankind. He could not have made a more enormous 
blunder. There was not a single great change made by 
the Assembly which had not been demanded in the lists 
of grievances that had been sent up by the nation to Ver- 
sailles. The division of the kingdom into districts, and 
the proportioning of the representation to taxes and pop- 
ulation ; the suppression of the intendants ; the suppres- 
sion of all monks, and the sale of their goods and estates ; 
the abolition of feudal rights, duties, and services ; the 
alienation of the King's domains ; the demolition of the 
Bastille ; these and all else we're in the prayers of half the 
petitions that the country had laid at the feet of the King. 
If this were merely an incidental blunder in a fact, it 
might be of no importance. But it was a blunder which 
went to the very root of the discussion. The fact that 
France was now at the back of the Assembly, inspiring 
its counsels and ratifying its decrees, was the cardinal 
element, and that is the fact which at this stage Burke 
systematically ignored. That he should have so ignored 
it, left him in a curious position, for it left him without 
any rational explanation of the sources of the policy which 
kindled his indignation and contempt. A publicist can 
never be sure of his position, until he can explain to him- 
self even what he does not wish to justify to others. 
Burke thought it enough to dwell upon the immense 
number of lawyers in the Assembly, and to show that 



162 BURKE. [chap. 

lawyers are naturally bad statesmen. He did not look 
the state of things steadily in the face. It was no easy 
thing to do. But Burke was a man who ought to have 
done it. He set all down to the ignorance, folly, and 
wickedness of the French leaders. This was as shallow 
as the way in which his enemies, the philosophers, used 
to set down the superstition of eighteen centuries to the 
craft of priests, and all defects in the government of Eu- 
rope to the cruelty of tyrants. How it came about that 
priests and tyrants acquired their irresistible power over 
men's minds, they never inquired. And Burke never in- 
quired into the enthusiastic acquiescence of the nation, 
and, what was most remarkable of all, the acquiescence of 
the army, in the strong measures of the Assembly. Burke 
was, in truth, so appalled by the magnitude of the enter- 
prise on which France had embarked, that he utterly for- 
got for once the necessity in political affairs, of seriously 
understanding the originating conditions of things. He 
was strangely content with the explanations that came 
from the malignants at Coblenz, and he actually told 
Francis that he charged the disorders not on the mob, 
but on the Duke of Orleans and Mirabeau, on Barnave 
and Bailly, on Lameth and Lafayette, who had spent im- 
mense sums of money, and used innumerable arts, to stir 
up the populace throughout France to the commission of 
the enormities that were shocking the conscience of Eu- 
rope. His imagination broke loose. His practical reason 
was mastered by something that was deeper in him than 
reason. 

This brings me to remark a really singular trait. In 
spite of the predominance of practical sagacity, of the 
habits and spirit of public business, of vigorous actuality 
in Burke's character, yet at the bottom of all his thoughts 



VIII.] BURKE'S POLITICAL MYSTICISM. 163 

about communities and governments there lay a certain 
mysticism. It was no irony, no literary trope, when he 
talked of our having taught the American husbandman 
" piously to believe in the mysterious virtue of wax and 
parchment." He was using no otiose epithet, when he 
described the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, "mould- 
ing together the great mysterious incorporation of the hu- 
man race." To him there actually was an clement of mys- 
tery in the cohesion of men in societies, in political obedi- 
ence, in the sanctity of contract ; in all that fabric of law 
and charter and obligation, whether written or unwritten, 
which is the sheltering bulwark between civilization and 
barbarism. AVhen reason and history had contributed all 
that they could to the explanation, it seemed to him as 
if the vital force, the secret of organization, the binding 
framework, must still come from the impenetrable regions 
beyond reasoning and beyond history. There was anoth- 
er great conservative writer of that age, whose genius was 
aroused into a protest against the revolutionary spiiit, as 
vehement as Burke's. This was Joseph de Maistre, one of 
the most learned, witty, and acute of all reactionary philos- 
ophers. De Maistre Avrote a book on the Generative Prin- 
ciple of Political Constitutions. He could only find this 
principle in the operation of occult and supernatural forces, 
producing the half-divine legislators who figure mysteriously 
in the early history of nations. Hence he held, and with 
astonishing ingenuity enforced, the doctrine that nothing 
else could deliver Europe from the Satanic forces of revo- 
lution — he used the word Satanic in all literal seriousness 
— save the divinely inspired supremacy of the Pope. No 
natural operations seemed at all adequate either to produce 
or to maintain the marvel of a coherent society. We are 
reminded of a professor who, in the fantastic days of geol- 



164 BURKE. [chap. 

ogy, explained the Pyramids of Egypt to be the remains 
of a volcanic eruption, which had forced its way upwards 
by a slow and stately motion ; the hieroglyphs were crys- 
talline formations; and the shaft of the great Pyramid 
was the air-hole of a volcano. De Maistre preferred a sim- 
ilar explanation of the monstrous structures of modern 
society. The hand of man could never have reared, and 
could never uphold them. If we cannot say that Burke 
laboured in constant travail with the same perplexity, it is 
at least true that he was keenly alive to it, and that one of 
the reasons why he dreaded to see a finger laid upon a 
single stone of a single political edifice, was his conscious- 
ness that he saw no answer to the perpetual enigma how 
any of these edifices had ever been built, and how the pas- 
sion, violence, and waywardness of the natural man had 
ever been persuaded to bow their necks to the strong yoke 
of a common social discipline. Never was mysticism more 
unseasonable; never was an hour when men needed more 
carefully to remember Burke's own wise practical precept, 
when he was talking about the British rule in India, that 
we must throw a sacred veil over the beginnings of gov- 
ernment. Many woes might perhaps have been saved to 
Europe, if Burke had applied this maxim to the govern- 
ment of the new France. 

Much has always been said about the inconsistency be- 
tween Burke's enmity to the Revolution, and his enmity 
to Lord North in one set of circumstances, and to Warren 
Hastings in another. The pamphleteers of the day made 
selections from the speeches and tracts of his happier time, 
and the seeming contrast had its effect. More candid op- 
ponents admitted then, as all competent persons admit 
now, that the inconsistency was merely verbal and super- 
ficial. Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, was only one of 



VIII.] ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY. 165 

many who observed very early that this was the unmistak- 
able temper of Burke's mind. " I admired, as everybody 
did," he said, " the talents, but not the principles of Mr. 
Burke; his opposition to the Clerical Petition [for relax- 
ation of subscription, 1772], first excited my suspicion of 
his being a High-Churchman in religion, and a Tory, per- 
haps an aristocratic Tory, in the state." Burke had, indeed, 
never been anything else than a conservative. He was like 
Falkland, who had bitterly assailed Strafford and Finch on 
the same principles on which, after the outbreak of the 
civil war, he consented to be secretary of state to King 
Charles. Coleridge is borne out by a hundred passages, 
when he says that in Burke's writings at the beginning of 
the American Revolution and in those at the beginning of 
the French Revolution, the principles are the same and the 
deductions are the same; the practical inferences are al- 
most opposite in the one case from those drawn in the 
other, yet in both equally legitimate. It would be better 
to say that they would have been equally legitimate, if 
Burke had been as right in his facts, and as ample in his 
knowledge in the case of France, as he was in the case of 
America. We feel, indeed, that, partly from want of this 
knowledge, he has gone too far from some of the wise 
maxims of an earlier time. What has become of the doc- 
trine that all great public collections of men — he w^as then 
speaking of the House of Commons — " possess a marked 
love of virtue and an abhorrence of vice."^ Why was the 
French Assembly not to have the benefit of this admirable 
generalisation ? What has become of all those sayings 
about the presumption, in all disputes between nations and 
rulers, " being at least upon a par in favour of the people ;" 
and a populace never rebelling from passion for attack, but 
^ American Taxation. 



166 BURKE. [chap. 

from impatience of suffering? And where is now that 
strong dictum, in the letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, that 
"general rebellions and revolts of a w^hole people never 
were encouraged, now or at any time ; they are always 
provolced P 

When all these things have been noted, to hold a man 
to his formulae without reference to their special applica- 
tion, is pure pedantry. Burke was the last man to lay 
down any political proposition not subject to the ever va- 
rying interpretation of circumstances, and independently of 
the particular use which was to be made of it. Nothing 
universal, he had always said, can be rationally affirmed on 
any moral or political subject. The lines of morality, 
again, are never ideal lines of mathematics, but are broad 
and deep as well as long, admitting of exceptions, and de- 
manding modifications. "These exceptions and modifi- 
cations are made, not by the process of logic, but by the 
rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank of 
the virtues, political and moral, but she is the director, the 
regulator, the standard of them all. As no moral ques- 
tions are ever abstract questions, this, before I judge upon 
any abstract proposition, must be embodied in circum- 
stances; for, since things are right and wrong, morally 
speaking, only by their relation and connection with other 
things, this very question of what it is politically right to 
grant, depends upon its relation to its effects." " Circum- 
stances," he says, never weary of laying down his great 
notion of political method, " give, in reality, to every po- 
litical principle its distinguishing colour and discriminat- 
ing effect. The circumstances are what render every civil 
and political scheme beneficial or obnoxious to mankind." 

This is at once the weapon with which he would have 
defended his own consistency, and attacked the absolute 



VIII.] HIS METHOD. 167 

proceedings in France. He changed Ins front, but he 
never changed his ground. He was not more passionate 
against the proscription in France than he had been against 
the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the American war. " I 
flatter myself," he said in the Reflections, " that I love a 
manly, moral, regulated liberty." Ten years before he had 
said, " The liberty, the only liberty I mean, is a liberty con- 
nected with order," The court tried to regulate liberty 
too severely. It found in him an inflexible opponent. 
Demagogues tried to remove the regulations of liberty. 
They encountered in him the bitterest and most unceasing 
of all remonstrants. The arbitrary majority in the House 
of Commons forgot for whose benefit they held power, 
from W'hom they derived their authority, and in what de- 
scription of government it was that they had a place. 
Burke was the most valiant and strenuous champion in the 
ranks of the independent minority. He withstood to the 
face the King and the King's friends. He withstood to the 
face Charles Fox and the Friends of the People. He may 
have been w^rong in both, or in either, but it is unreasona- 
ble to tell us that he turned back in his course ; that he 
was a revolutionist in lllO, and a reactionist in 1790; 
that he was in his sane mind when he opposed the suprem- 
acy of the Court, but that his reason was tottering when 
he opposed the supremacy of the Faubourg Saint Antoine. 
There is no part of Burke's career at which we may not 
find evidence of his instinctive and undying repugnance to 
the critical or revohitionary spirit and all its works. From 
the early days when he had parodied Bolingbroke, down 
to the later time when he denounced Condorcet as a fanat- 
ical atheist, with " every disposition to the lowest as well 
as the highest and most determined villanies," he invaria- 
bly suspected or denounced everybody, virtuous or vicious, 



168 BURKE. [chap. 

high-minded or ignoble, who inquired with too keen a 
scrutiny into the foundations of morals, of religion, of so- 
cial order. To examine with a curious or unfavourable eye 
the bases of established opinions, was to show a leaning 
to anarchy, to atheism, or to unbridled libertinism. Al- 
ready we have seen how, three years after the publication 
of his Thoughts on the Present Discontents^ and seven- 
teen years before the composition of the Reflections, he 
denounced the philosophers with a fervour and a vehe- 
mence which he never afterwards surpassed. When some 
of the clergy petitioned to be relieved from some of the 
severities of subscription, he had resisted them on the bold 
ground that the truth of a proposition deserves less atten- 
tion than the effect of adherence to it upon the established 
order of things. " I will not enter into the question," he 
told the House of Commons, " how much truth is prefera- 
ble to peace. Perhaps truth may be far better. But as 
we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one that 
we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evi- 
dent indeed, hold fast to peace." In that intellectual rest- 
lessness, to which the world is so deeply indebted, Burke 
could recognize but scanty merit. Himself the most in- 
dustrious and active-minded of men, he was ever sober in 
cutting the channels of his activity, and he would have 
had others equally moderate. Perceiving that plain and 
righteous conduct is the end of life in this world, he 
prayed men not to be over-curious in searching for, and 
handling, and again handling, the theoretic base on which 
the prerogatives of virtue repose. Provided that there 
was peace, that is to say, so much of fair happiness and 
content as is compatible with the conditions of the human 
lot, Burke felt that a too great inquisitiveness as to its 
foundations was not only idle but cruel. 



VIII.] PHILOSOPHICAL REACTION. 169 

If the world continues to read the Refiections, and reads 
it with a new admiration that is not diminished by the 
fact that on the special issue its tendency is every day 
more clearly discerned to have been misleading, we may be 
sure that it is not for the sake of such things as the pre- 
cise character of the Revolution of 1688, where, for that 
matter, constitutional writers have shown abundantly that 
Burke was nearly as much in the wrong as Dr. Sacheverell. 
Nor has the book lived merely by its gorgeous rhetoric 
and high emotions, though these have been contributing 
elements. It lives because it contains a sentiment, a meth- 
od, a set of informal principles, which, awakened into new 
life after the Revolution, rapidly transformed the current 
ways of thinking and feeling about all the most serious 
objects of our attention, and have powerfully helped to 
give a richer substance to all modern literature. In the 
Reflections we have the first great sign that the ideas on 
government and philosophy which Locke had been the 
chief agent in setting into European circulation, and which 
had carried all triumphantly before them throughout the 
century, did not comprehend the whole truth nor the deep- 
est truth about human character — the relations of men and 
the union of men in society. It has often been said that 
the armoury from which the French philosophers of the 
eighteenth century borrowed their weapons was furnished 
from England, and it may be added as truly that the re- 
action against that whole scheme of thought came from 
England. In one sense we may call the Reflections a po- 
litical pamphlet, but it is much more than this, just as the 
movement against which it was levelled was much more 
than a political movement. The Revolution rested on a 
philosophy, and Burke confronted it with an antagonistic 
philosophy. Those are but superficial readers who fail to 
8* 



IIQ BURKE. [chap. 

see at liow many points Burke, while seeming only to deal 
with the French monarchy and the British constitution, 
with Dr. Price and Marie Antoinette, was in fact, and ex- 
actly because he dealt with them in the comprehensive 
spirit of true philosophy, turning men's minds to an atti- 
tude from which not only the political incidents of the 
hour, but the current ideas about religion, psychology, the 
very nature of human knowledge, would all be seen in a 
changed light and clothed in new colour. All really pro- 
found speculation about society comes in time to touch the 
heart of every other object of speculation, not by directly 
contributing new truths or directly corroborating old ones, 
but by setting men to consider the consequences to life of 
different opinions on these abstract subjects, and their rela- 
tions to the great paramount interests of society, however 
those interests may happen at the time to be conceived. 
Burke's book marks a turning-point in literary history, 
because it was the signal for that reaction over the whole 
field of thought, into which the Revolution drove many of 
the finest minds of the next generation, by showing the 
supposed consequences of pure individualistic rationalism. 
We need not attempt to work out the details of this ex- 
tension of a political reaction into a universal reaction in 
philosophy and poetry. Any one may easily think out 
for himself what consequences in act and thought, as well 
as in government, would be likely to flow, for example, 
from one of the most permanently admirable sides of 
Burke's teaching — his respect for the collective reason of 
men, and his sense of the impossibility in politics and 
morals of considering the individual apart from the expe- 
rience of the race. " We are afraid," he says, " to put 
men to live and trade each on his own private stock of 
reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is 



VIII.] PHILOSOPHICAL REACTION. 171 

small, and that the individuals would do better to avail 
themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and 
of ages. Many of our men of speculation^ instead of ex- 
ploding general prejudices^ employ their sagacity to discov- 
er the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find 
what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more 
wise to continue the prejudice with the reason involved, 
than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave noth- 
ing but the naked reason : because prejudice with its rea- 
son has a motive to give action to that reason, and an af- 
fection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of 
ready application in the emergency ; it previously engages 
the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and 
does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of deci- 
sion, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders 
a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected 
acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his 
nature." Is not this to say, in other words, that in every 
man the substantial foundations of action consist of the 
accumulated layers which various generations of ancestors 
have placed for him ; that the greater part of our senti- 
ments act most effectively when they act most mechanical- 
ly, and by the methods of an unquestioned system ; that 
although no rule of conduct or spring of action ought to 
endure which does not repose in sound reason, yet this 
naked reason is in itself a less effective means of influenc- 
ing action than when it exists as one part of a fabric of 
ancient and endeared association ? Interpreted by a mo- 
bile genius and expanded by a poetic imagination, all this 
became the foundation from which the philosophy of 
Coleridge started, and, as Mill has shown in a famous es- 
say, Coleridge was the great apostle of the conservative 
spirit in England in its best form. 



172 BURKE. [chap. 

Though Burke here, no doubt, found a true base for the 
philosophy of order, yet perhaps Condorcet or Barnave 
might have justly asked him whether, when we thus real- 
ize the strong and immovable foundations which are laid 
in our character before we are born, there could be any oc- 
casion, as a matter of fact, for that vehement alarm which 
moved Burke lest a few lawyers, by a score of parchment 
decrees, should overthrow the venerated sentiments of Eu- 
rope about justice and about property? Should he not 
have known better than most men the force of the self- 
protecting elements of society ? 

This is not a convenient place for discussing the issues 
between the school of order and the school of progress. 
It is enough to have marked Burke's position in one of 
them. The Reflections places him among the great Con- 
servatives of history. Perhaps the only Englishman with 
whom in this respect he may be compared is Sir Thomas 
More, that virtuous and eloquent reactionist of the six- 
teenth century. More abounded in light, in intellectual 
interests, in single-minded care for the common weal. He 
was as anxious as any man of his time for the improved 
ordering of the Church, but he could not endure that ref- 
ormation should be bought at the price of breaking up 
the ancient spiritual unity of Europe. He was willing to 
slay and be slain rather than he would tolerate the de- 
struction of the old faith, or assent to the violence of the 
new statecraft. He viewed Thomas Cromwell's policy of 
reformation just as Burke viewed Mirabeau's policy of 
revolution. Burke too, we may be very sure, would as 
willingly have sent Mirabeau and Bailly to prison or the 
"block as More sent Phillips to the Tower and Bainham to 
the stake. For neither More nor Burke was of the gentle 
contemplative spirit, which the first disorder of a new so- 



r 



VIII.] SIR THOMAS MORE. 173 

ciety just bursting into life merely overshadows with sad- 
dening regrets and poetic gloom. The old harmony was 
to them so bound up with the purpose and meaning of 
life, that to Avage active battle for the gods of their rever- 
ence was the irresistible instinct of self-preservation. More 
had an excuse which Burke had not, for the principle of 
persecution was accepted by the best minds of the six- 
teenth century, but by the best minds of the eighteenth it 
was emphatically repudiated. 

Another illustrious name of Burke's own era rises to 
our lips, as we ponder mentally the too scanty list of those 
who have essayed the great and hardy task of reconciling 
order with progress. Turgot is even a more imposing- 
figure than Burke himself. The impression made upon 
us by the pair is indeed very different, for Turgot was 
austere, reserved, distant, a man of many silences, and 
much suspense ; while Burke, as we know, was imagina- 
tive, exuberant, unrestrained, and, like some of the great- 
est actors on the stage of human affairs, he had associated 
his own personality with the prevalence of right ideas and 
good influences. In Turgot, on the other hand, we dis- 
cern something of the isolation, the sternness, the disdain- 
ful melancholy of Tacitus. He even rises out of the eager, 
bustling, shrill-tongued crowd of the Yoltairean age with 
some of that austere moral indignation and haughty as- 
tonishment with which Dante had watched the stubborn 
ways of men centuries before. On one side Turgot shared 
the conservatism of Burke, though, perhaps, he would 
hardly have given it that name. He habitually corrected 
the headlong insistence of the revolutionary philosophers, 
his friends, by reminding them that neither pity, nor be- 
nevolence, nor hope can ever dispense with justice ; and 
he could never endure to hear of great changes being 



IH BUEKE. [chap. 

wronglit at the cost of this sovereign quality. Like Burke, 
he held fast to the doctrine that everything must be done 
for the multitude, but nothing by them. Like Burke, he 
realized how close are the links that bind the successive 
generations of men, and make up the long chain of human 
history. Like Burke, he never believed that the human 
mind has any spontaneous inclination to welcome pure 
truth. Here, however, is visible between them a hard line 
of division. It is not error, said Turgot, which opposes 
the progress of truth ; it is indolence, obstinacy, and the 
spirit of routine. But then Turgot enjoined upon us to 
make it the aim of life to do battle in ourselves and others 
with all this indolence, obstinacy, and spirit of routine in 
the world; while Burke, on the contrary, gave to these 
bad things gentler names, he surrounded them with the 
picturesque associations of the past, and in the great world- 
crisis of his time he threw all his passion and all his genius 
on their side. Will any reader doubt which of these two 
types of the school of order and justice, both of them no- 
ble, is the more valuable for the race, and the worthier and 
more stimulating ideal for the individual ? 

It is not certain that Burke was not sometimes for a 
moment startled by the suspicion that he might unawares 
be fighting against the truth. In the midst of flaming 
and bitter pages, we now and again feel a cool breath from 
the distant region of a half -pensive tolerance. " I do not 
think," he says at the close of the Meflections, to the per- 
son to whom they were addressed, "that my sentiments 
are likely to alter yours. I do not know that they ought. 
You are young ; you cannot guide, but must follow, the 
fortune of your country. But hereafter they may be of 
some use to you, in some future form which your com- 
monwealth may take. In the present it can hardly re- 



VIII.] TURGOT. ITS 

main ; but before its final settlement, it may be obliged to 
pass, as one of our poets says, * through great varieties of 
untried being,' and in all its transmigrations to be purified 
by fire and blood." 

He felt in the midst of his hate that what he took for 
seething chaos might after all be the struggle upwards of 
the germs of order. Among the later words that he wrote 
on the Revolution were these : " If a great change is to 
be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted 
to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that 
way. Every fear, every hope, will forward it ; and then 
they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human 
affairs will appear rather to resist the decrees of Provi- 
dence itself than the mere designs of men." We can only 
regret that these rays of the mens divinior did not shine 
with a more steadfast light ; and that a spirit which, amid 
the sharp press of manifold cares and distractions, had ever 
vibrated with lofty sympathies, was not now more constant 
to its faith in the beneficent powers and processes of the 
Unseen Time. 



CHAPTER IX. 

BURKE AND HIS PARTY PROaRESS OF THE REVOLUTION — ■ 

IRELAND LAST YEARS. 

For some montlis after the publication of the Reflections^ 
Burke kept up the relations of an armed peace with his 
old political friends. The impeachment went on, and in 
December (1790) there was a private meeting on the busi- 
ness connected with it, between Pitt, Burke, Fox, and Dun- 
das, at the house of the Speaker. It was described by one 
who knew as most snug and amiable, and there seems to 
have been a general impression in the world at this mo- 
ment that Fox might by some means be induced to join 
Pitt. What troubled the slumbers of good Whigs like 
Gilbert Elliot was the prospect of Fox committing himself 
too strongly on French affairs. Burke himself was in the 
deepest dejection at the prospect ; for Fox did not cease 
to express the most unqualified disapproval of the Reflec- 
tions; he thought that, even in point of composition, it 
was the worst thing that Burke had ever published. It 
was already feared that his friendship for Sheridan w^as 
drawing him further away from Burke, with whom Sheri- 
dan had quarrelled, into a course of politics that would 
both damage his own reputation, and break up the strong 
union of which the Duke of Portland was the nominal 
head. 

New floods in France had not yet carried back the ship 



CHAP. IX.] THE RUSSIAN ARMAMENT. 177 

of state into raging waters. Pitt was thinking so little of 
danger from that country, that he had plunged into a pol- 
icy of intervention in the affairs of eastern Europe. When 
writers charge Burke with breaking violently in upon Pitt's 
system of peace abroad and reform at home, they overlook 
the fact that before Burke had begun to preach his cru- 
sade against the Jacobins, Pitt had already prepared a war 
with Russia. The nation refused to follow. They agreed 
with Fox that it was no concern of theirs whether or not 
Russia took from Turkey the country between the Boug 
and Dniester; they felt that British interests would be 
more damaged by the expenses of a war than by the ac- 
quisition by Russia of Ockzakow. Pitt was obliged to 
throw up the scheme, and to extricate himself as well as 
he could from rash engagements with Prussia. It was on 
account of his services to the cause of peace on this oc- 
casion that Catharine ordered the Russian ambassador to 
send her a bust of Fox in white marble, to be placed in 
her colonnade between Demosthenes and Cicero. We may 
take it for granted that after the Revolution rose to its full 
height, the bust of Fox accompanied that of Voltaire down 
to the cellar of the Hermitage. 

While the affair of the Russian armament was still oc- 
cupying the minister, an event of signal importance hap- 
pened in the ranks of his political adversaries. The alli- 
ance which had lasted between Burke and Fox for five-and- 
twenty years came to a sudden end, and this rift gradual- 
ly widened into a destructive breach throughout the party. 
There is no parallel in our parliamentary history to the 
fatal scene. In Ireland, indeed, only eight years before, 
Flood and Grattan, after fighting side by side for many 
years, had all at once sprung upon one another in the 
Parliament House with the furv of vultures : Flood had 



lis BURKE. [chap. 

screamed to Grattan that lie was a mendicant patriot, and 
Grattan had called Flood an ill-omened bird of night, with 
a sepulchral note, a cadaverous aspect, and a broken beak. 
The Irish, like the French, have the art of making things 
dramatic, and Burke was the greatest of Irishmen. On 
the opening of the session of 1791, the government had 
introduced a bill for the better government of Canada. It 
introduced questions about church establishments and he- 
reditary legislators. In discussing these. Fox made some 
references to France. It was impossible to refer to France 
without touching the Rejlections on the French Revolution. 
Burke was not present, but he heard what Fox had said, 
and before long Fox again introduced French affairs in a 
debate on the Russian armament. Burke rose in violent 
heat of mind to reply, but the House wo aid not hear him. 
He resolved to speak when the time came for the Canada 
Bill to be recommitted. Meanwhile some of his friends 
did all that they could to dissuade him from pressing the 
matter further. Even the Prince of Wales is said to have 
written him a letter. There were many signs of the rupt- 
ure that was so soon to come in the Whig ranks. Men 
so equally devoted to the common cause as Windham and 
Elliot nearly came to a quarrel at a dinner-party at Lord 
Malmesbury's, on the subject of Burke's design to speak ; 
and Windham, who for the present sided with Fox, enters 
in his diary that he was glad to escape from the room 
without speaking to the man whom, since the death of 
Dr. Johnson, he revered before all others. 

On the day appointed for the Canada Bill, Fox called at 
Burke's house, and after some talk on Burke's intention to 
speak, and on other matters, they walked down to West- 
minster and entered the House together, as they had so 
many a time done before, but were never to do again. 



IX.] QUARREL WITH FOX. 179 

They found that the debate had been adjourned, and it 
was not until May 6th that Burke had an opportunity of 
explaining himself on the Revolution in France. He had 
no sooner risen, than interruptions broke out from his 
own side, and a scene of great disorder followed. Burke 
was incensed beyond endurance by this treatment, for even 
Fox and AVindham had taken part in the tumult against 
him. With much bitterness he commented on Fox's pre- 
vious eulogies of the Revolution, and finally there came the 
fatal words of severance. "It is indiscreet," he said, " at 
any period, but especially at my time of life, to provoke 
enemies, or give my friends occasion to desert me. Yet 
if my firm and steady adherence to the British Constitu- 
tion place me in such a dilemma, I am ready to risk it, 
and with my last words to exclaim, ' Fly from the French 
Constitution.' " Fox at this point eagerly called to him 
that there was no loss of friends. " Yes, yes," cried Burke, 
" there is a loss of friends. I know the price of my con- 
duct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend. 
Our friendship is at an end." 

The members who sat on the same side were aghast at 
proceedings which went beyond their worst apprehensions. 
Even the ministerialists were shocked. Pitt agreed much 
more with Fox than with Burke, but he would have been 
more than human if he had not watched with complacency 
his two most formidable adversaries turning- their swords 
against one another. Wilberforce, who was more disin- 
terested, lamented the spectacle as shameful. In the gal- 
leries there w^as hardly a dry eye. Fox, as might have 
been expected from his warm and generous nature, was 
deeply moved, and is described as weeping even to sob- 
bing. He repeated his former acknowledgment of his 
debt to Burke, and he repeated his former expression of 



180 BURKE. [chap. 

faith in the blessings which the abolition of royal despot- 
ism would bring to France. With unabated vehemence 
Burke again rose to denounce the French Constitution — 
"a building composed of untempered mortar — the work 
of Goths and Vandals, where everything was disjointed 
and inverted." After a short rejoinder from Fox, the 
scene came to a close, and the once friendly intercourse 
between the two heroes was at an end. When they met 
in the Manao-ers' box in Westminster Hall on the business 
of Hastings's trial, they met with the formalities of stran- 
gers. There is a story that when Burke left the House 
on the night of the quarrel it was raining, and Mr. Cur- 
wen, a member of the Opposition, took him home in his 
carriage. Burke at once began to declaim against the 
French. Curwen dropped some remark on the other side. 
" What !" Burke cried out, grasping the check-string, " are 
you one of these people ! Set me down." It needed all 
Curwen's force to keep him where he was ; and when they 
reached his house, Burke stepped out without saying a 
single word. 

We may agree that all this did not indicate the perfect 
sobriety and self-control proper to a statesman, in what 
was a serious crisis both to his party and to Europe. It 
was about this time that Burke said to Addington, who 
was then Speaker of the House of Commons, that he was 
not well. " I eat too much. Speaker," he said, " I drink 
too much, and I sleep too little." It is even said that he 
felt the final breach with Fox as a relief from unendurable 
suspense; and he quoted the lines about JEneas, after he 
had finally resolved to quit Dido and the Carthaginian 
shore, at last being able to snatch slumber in his ship's tall 
stern. There can be no doubt how severe had been the 
tension. Yet the performance to which Burke now ap- 



IX.] RESENTMENT OF THE PARTY. 181 

plied himself is one of the gravest and most reasonable 
of all his compositions. He felt it necessary to vindicate 
the fundamental consistency between his present and his 
past. We have no difficulty in imagining the abuse to 
which he was exposed from those whose abuse gave him 
pain. In a country governed by party, a politician who 
quits the allies of a lifetime must expect to pay the pen- 
alty. The Whig papers told him that he was expected to 
surrender his seat in Parliament. They imputed to him 
all sorts of sinister motives. His name was introduced 
into ironical toasts. For a whole year there was scarcely 
a member of his former party who did not stand aloof 
from him. Windham, when the feeling was at its height, 
sent w^ord to a host that he w^ould rather not meet Burke 
at dinner. Dr. Parr, though he thought Mr. Burke the 
greatest man upon earth, declared himself most indignant- 
ly and most fixedly on the side of Mr. Sheridan and Mr. 
Fox. The Duke of Portland, though always described as 
strongly and fondly attached to him, and Gilbert Elliot, 
who thought that Burke was right in his views on the Rev- 
olution, and right in expressing them, still could not for- 
give the open catastrophe, and for many months all the old 
habits of intimacy among them were entirely broken off. 

Burke did not bend to the storm. He went down to 
Margate, and there finished the Appeal from the New to 
the Old Whigs. Meanwhile he dispatched his son to 
Coblenz to give advice to the royalist exiles, who were 
then mainly in the hands of Calonne, one of the very 
worst of the ministers whom Louis XVI. had tried be- 
tween his dismissal of Turgot in 1774, and the meeting of 
the States-General in 1789. This measure w^as taken at 
the request of Calonne, who had visited Burke at Margate. 
The English government did not disapprove of it, though 



182 BUKKE. [chap. 

they naturally declined to invest either young Burke or 
any one else with authority from themselves. As little 
came of the mission as might have been expected from the 
frivolous, unmanly, and enraged spirit of those to whom it 
was addressed. 

In August (1791), while Richard Burke was at Coblenz, 
the Appeal was published. This was the last piece that 
Burke wrote on the Revolution, in which there is any pre- 
tence of measure, sobriety, and calm judgment in face of 
a formidable and perplexing crisis. Henceforth it is not 
political philosophy, but the minatory exhortation of a 
prophet. We deal no longer with principles and ideas, 
but with a partisan denunciation of particular acts, and a 
partisan incitement to a given practical policy. We may 
appreciate the policy as we choose, but our appreciation of 
Burke as a thinker and a contributor to political wisdom 
is at an end. He is now only Demosthenes thundering 
against Philip, or Cicero shrieking against Mark Antony. 

The Reflections had not been published many months 
before Burke wrote the Letter to a Member of the National 
Assembly (January, 1791), in which strong disapproval had 
grown into furious hatred. It contains the elaborate dia- 
tribe against Rousseau, the grave panegyric on Cromwell 
for choosing Hale to be Chief Justice, and a sound criti- 
cism on the laxity and want of foresight in the manner in 
which the States-General had been convened. Here first 
Burke advanced to the position that it might be the duty 
of other nations to interfere to restore the King to his 
rightful authority, just as England and Prussia had inter- 
fered to save Holland from confusion, as they had inter- 
fered to preserve the hereditary constitution in the Aus- 
trian Netherlands, and as Prussia had interfered to snatch 
even the malignant and the turban'd Turk from the pounce 



IX.] BURKE ADVOCATES INTERFERENCE. 183 

of the Russian eagle. Was not the King of France as 
much an object of policy and compassion as the Grand 
Seignior ? As this was the first piece in which Burke 
hinted at a crusade, so it was the first in which he began 
to heap upon the heads, not of Hebert, Fouquier-Tinville, 
Billaud, nor even of Robespierre or Danton — for none of 
these had yet been heard of — but of able and conscien- 
tious men in the Constituent Assembly, language . of a 
virulence which Fox once said seriously that Burke had 
picked, even to the phrases of it, out of the wTitings of 
Salmasius against Milton, but which is really only to be 
paralleled by the much worse language of Milton against 
Salmasius. It was in truth exactly the kind of incensed 
speech which, at a later date, the factions in Paris level- 
led against one another, when Girondins screamed for the 
heads of Jacobins, and Robespierre denounced Danton, 
and Tallien cried for the blood of Robespierre. 

Burke declined most wisely to suggest any plan for the 
National Assembly. " Permit me to say " — this is in the 
letter of January, 1791, to a member of the Assembly — 
"that if I were as confident as I ought to be difladent in 
my own loose general ideas, I never should venture to 
broach them, if but at twenty leagues' distance from the 
centre of your affairs. I must see with my own eyes; I 
must in a manner touch with my own hands, not only the 
fixed, but momentary circumstances, before I could venture 
to suggest any political project whatsoever. I must know 
the power and disposition to accept, to execute, to perse- 
vere. I must see all the aids and all the obstacles. I 
must see the means of correcting the plan, where correc- 
tives would be wanted. I must see the things : I must 
see the men. Without a concurrence and adaptation of 
these to the design, the very best speculative projects 



184 BURKE. [chap. 

might become not only useless but mischievous. Plans 
must be made for men. People at a distance must judge 
ill of men. They do not always answer to their reputa- 
tion when you approach them. Nay, the perspective va- 
ries, and shows tbem quite other than you thougbt tbem. 
At a distance, if we judge uncertainly of men, we must 
judge worse of opportunities, which continually vary their 
shapes and colours, and pass away like clouds." Our ad- 
miration at such words is quickly stifled when we recall 
the confident, unsparing, immoderate criticism which both 
preceded and followed this truly rational exposition of the 
danger of advising, in cases where we know neither the 
men nor the opportunities. Why was savage and unfal- 
tering denunciation any less unbecoming than, as he ad- 
mits, crude prescriptions would have been unbecoming ? 

By the end of 1791, when he wrote the Thoughts on 
French Affairs, he had penetrated still farther into the es- 
sential character of the Revolution. Any notion of a re- 
form to be effected after the decorous pattern of 1688, so 
conspicuous in the first great manifesto, had wholly disap- 
peared. The changes in France he allowed to bear little 
resemblance or analogy to any of those which had been 
previously brought about in Europe. It is a revolution, 
he said, of doctrine and theoretic dogma. The Reforma- 
tion was the last revolution of this sort which had happen- 
ed in Europe; and he immediately goes on to remark a 
point of striking resemblance between them. The effect 
of the Reformation was " to introduce other interests into 
all countries than those which arose from their locality 
and natural circumstances." In like manner other sources 
of faction were now opened, combining parties among the 
inhabitants of different countries into a single connection. 
^From these sources, effects were likely to arise fully as im- 



IX.] HIS FINAL POLICY. 185 

portant as those whicli had formerly arisen from the jar- 
ring interests of the religious sects. It is a species of fac- 
tion which " breaks the locality of public affections."^ 

He was thus launched on the full tide of his policy. 
The French Revolution must be hemmed in by a cordon 
of fire. Those who sympathised w^ith it in England must 
be gagged, and if gagging did not suffice, they must be 
taught respect for the constitution in dungeons and on the 
gallows. His cry for war abroad and arbitrary tyranny at 
home waxed louder every day. As Fox said, it was lucky 
that Burke took the royal side in the Revolution, for his 
violence would certainly have got him hanged if he had 
happened to take the other side. 

It was in the early summer of 1792 that Miss Burney 
again met Burke at Mrs. Crewe's villa at Hampstead. He 
entered into an animated conversation on Lord Macartney 
and the Chinese expedition, reviving all the old enthusiasm 
of his companion by his allusions and anecdotes, his brill- 
iant fancies and wide information. When politics were 
introduced, he spoke with an eagerness and a vehemence 
that instantly banished the graces, though it redoubled the 
energies of his discourse. " How I wish," Miss Burney 
writes, " that you could meet this wonderful man when he 
is easy, happy, and with people he cordially likes. But 
politics, even on his own side, must always be excluded ; 

* De Tocqucviile has unconsciously imitated Burke's very phrases. 
" Toutes les revolutions civiles et politiques ont eu une patrie, et s'y 
sont enfermees. La Revolution fran9aise ... on I'a vue rapprocher 
ou diviser les hommes en depit des lois, des traditions, des caract^res, 
de langue, rendant parfois ennemis des compatriotes, et fr^res des 
etrangers ; ou plutot elle a forme audesstis de toutes les nationalites par- 
ticulieres^ une patrie intellectuelJe commune dont les hom,mes de toutes les 
nations ont pu devenir citoyens.''^ — Ancien Regime, p. 15. 
9 



186 BURKE. [chap. 

his irritability is so terrible on that tboDie, that it gives 
immediately to his face the expression of a man who is 
going to defend himself from murderersy 

Burke still remained witbout a following, but the ranks 
of his old allies gradually began to show signs of waver- 
ing. His panic about the Jacobins within the gates slowly 
spread. His old faith, about w4iich he had once talked so 
much, in the ancient rustic, manly, home-bred sense of the 
English people, he dismissed as if it had been some idle 
dream that had come to him through the ivory gate. His 
fine comparison of the nation to a majestic herd, browsing 
in peace amid the importunate chirrupings of a thousand 
crickets, became so little appropriate, that he was now 
beside himself with apprehension that the crickets were 
about to rend the oxen in pieces. Even then the herd 
stood tranquilly in their pastures, only occasionally turn- 
ing a dull eye, now to France, and now to Burke. In the 
autumn of 1791, Burke dined with Pitt and Lord Gren- 
ville, and he found them resolute for an honest neutrality 
in the affairs of France, and " quite out of all apprehen- 
sions of any effect from the French Kevolution in this 
kingdom, either at present or any time to come." Fran- 
cis and Sheridan, it is true, spoke as if they almost wished 
for a domestic convulsion ; and cool observers who saw 
liim daily, even accused Sheridan of wishing to stir up the 
lower ranks of the people by the hope of plundering their 
betters. But men who afterwards became alarmists are 
found, so late as the spring of 1792, declaring in their 
most confidential correspondence that the party of confu- 
sion made no way with the country, and produced no ef- 
fect. Home Tooke was its most conspicuous chief, and 
nobody pretended to fear the subversion of the realm by 
Home Tooke. Yet Burke, in letters where he admits that 



IX.] STATE OF ENGLISH FEELIXG. 187 

the democratic party is entirely discountenanced, and that 
the Jacobin faction in England is under a heavy cloud, 
was so possessed by the spectre of panic, as to declare 
that the Duke of Brunswick was as much fighting the 
battle of the crown of England as the Duke of Cumber- 
land fought that battle at Culloden. 

Time and events, meaiTtvhile, had been powerfully tell- 
ing for Burke. While he was writing his Appeal, the 
French King and Queen had destroyed whatever confi- 
dence sanguine dreamers might have had in their loyalty 
to the new order of things, by attempting to escape over 
the frontier. They were brought back, and a manful at- 
tempt was made to get the new constitution to work, in 
the winter of 1791-92. It was soon found out that 
Mirabeau had been right, when he said that for a mon- 
archy it was too democratic, and for a republic there was 
a king too much. This was Burke's Reflections in a nut- 
shell. But it was foreign intervention that finally ruined 
the King, and destroyed the hope of an orderly issue. 
Frederick the Great had set the first example of what 
some call iniquity and violence in Europe, and others in 
milder terms call a readjustment of the equilibrium of 
nations. He had taken Silesia from the House of Aus- 
tria, and he had shared in the first partition of Poland. 
Catharine H. had followed him at the expense of Poland, 
Sweden, and Turkey. However we may view these trans- 
actions, and whether we describe them by the stern words 
of the moralist, or the more deprecatory words of the 
diplomatist, they are the first sources of that storm of law- 
less rapine which swept over every part of Europe for five- 
and-twenty years to come. The intervention of Austria 
and Prussia in the affairs of France was originally less a 
deliberate design for the benefit of the old order than an 



188 BURKE. [chap. 

interlude in the intrigues of eastern Europe, But the first 
effect of intervention on behalf of the French monarchy 
was to bring it in a few weeks to the ground. 

In the spring of 1792 France replied to the prepara- 
tions of Austria and Prussia for invasion by a declaration 
of war. It w^as inevitable that the French people should 
associate the court with the foreign enemy that was com- 
ing to its deliverance. Everybody knew as well then as 
we know it now, that the Queen was as bitterly incensed 
against the new order of things, and as resolutely unfaith- 
ful to it, as the most furious emigrant on the Rhine. Even 
Burke himself, writing to his son at Coblenz, was con- 
strained to talk about Marie Antoinette as that " most un- 
fortunate woman, who was not to be cured of the spirit of 
court intrigue even by a prison." The King may have 
been loyally resigned to his position, but resignation will 
not defend a country from the invader; and the nation 
distrusted a chief who only a few months before had been 
arrested in full flight to join the national enemy. Power 
naturally fell into the hands of the men of conviction, en- 
ergy, passion, and resource. Patriotism and republicanism 
became synonymous, and the constitution against which 
Burke had prophesied was henceforth a dead letter. The 
spirit of insurrection that had slumbered since the fall 
of the Bastille and the march to Versailles in 1789, now 
awoke in formidable violence, and after the preliminary re- 
hearsal of what is known in the revolutionary calendar as 
the 20th of June (1792), the people of Paris responded to 
the Duke of Brunswick's insensate manifesto by the more 
memorable day of the 10th of August. Brunswick, ac- 
cepting the hateful language which the French emigrants 
put into bis mouth, had declared that every member of the 
national guard taken with arms in his hands would be im- 



IX.] THE FEENCH KING'S DEATH. 189 

mediately put to death ; that every inhabitant who should 
dare to defend himself, would be put to death and his 
house burnt to the ground; and that if the least insult 
was offered to the royal family, then their Austrian and 
Prussian majesties would deliver Paris to military execu- 
tion and total destruction. This is the vindictive ferocity 
which only civil war can kindle. To convince men that 
the manifesto was not an empty threat, on the day of its 
publication a force of nearly 140,000 Austrians, Prussians, 
and Hessians entered France. The sections of Paris re- 
plied by marching to the Tuileries, and after a furious con- 
flict with the Swiss guards, they stormed the chateau. The 
King and his family had fled to the National Assembly. 
The same evening they were thrown into prison, whence 
the King and Queen only came out on their way to the 
scaffold. 

It was the King's execution in January, 1793, that final- 
ly raised feeling in England to the intense heat which 
Burke had for so long been craving. The evening on 
which the courier brouo-ht the news was never forgotten 
by those who were in London at the time. The play- 
houses were instantly closed, and the audiences insisted on 
retiring with half the amusement for which they had paid. 
People of the lowest and the highest rank alike put on 
mourning. The French were universally denounced as 
fiends upon earth. It was hardly safe for a Frenchman to 
appear in the streets of London. Placards were posted on 
every wall, calling for war, and the crowds who gathered 
round them read them with loud hurrahs. 

It would be a great mistake to say that Pitt ever lost 
his head, but he lost his feet. The momentary passion of 
the nation forced him out of the pacific path in which he 



190 BURKE. [chap. 

would have cliosen to stay. Burke had become the great- 
est power in the country, and was in closer communication 
with the ministers than any one out of office. He went 
once about this time with Windham and Elliot, to inform 
Pitt as to the uneasiness of the public about the slackness 
of our naval and military preparation. "Burke," says one 
of the party, " gave Pitt a little political instruction in a 
very respectful and cordial way, but with the authority of 
an old and most informed statesman, and although nobody 
ever takes the whole of Burke's advice, yet he often, or al- 
w^ays rather, furnishes very important and useful matter, 
some part of which sticks and does good. Pitt took it all 
very patiently and cordially." 

It was in the December of 1792 that Burke had enacted 
that famous bit of melodrama out of place, known as the 
Dagger Scene. The Government had brought in an Alien 
Bill, imposing certain pains and restrictions on foreigners 
coming to this country. Fox denounced it as a concession 
to foolish alarms, and was followed by Burke, who began 
to storm as usual against murderous atheists. Then, with- 
out due preparation, he began to fumble in his bosom, sud- 
denly drew out a dagger, and with an extravagant gesture 
threw it on the floor of the House, crying that this was 
what they had to expect from their alliance with France. 
The stroke missed its mark, and there was a general incli- 
nation to titter, until Burke, collecting himself for an ef- 
fort, called upon them with a vehemence to which his lis- 
teners could not choose but respond, to keep French prin- 
ciples from their heads, and French daggers from their 
hearts ; to preserve all their blandishments in life, and all 
their consolations in death ; all the blessings of time, and 
all the hopes of eternity. All this was not prepared long 
beforehand, for it seems that the dagger had only been 



IX.] NEGOTIATIONS. 191 

shown to Burke on his way to the House, as one that had 
been sent to Birmingham to be a pattern for a large order. 
Whether prepared or unprepared, the scene was one from 
which we gladly avert our eyes. 

Negotiations had been going on for some months, and 
they continued in various stages for some months longer, 
for a coalition between the two great parties of the state. 
Burke was persistently anxious that Fox should join Pitt's 
government. Pitt always admitted the importance of 
Fox's abilities in the difficult affairs which lay before the 
ministry, and declared that he had no sort of personal an- 
imosity to Fox, but rather a personal good-will and good- 
liking. Fox himself said of a coalition, "It is so damned 
right, to be sure, that I cannot help thinking it must be." 
But the difficulties were insuperable. The more rapidly 
the government drifted in Burke's direction, the more im- 
possible was it for a man of Fox's political sympathies 
and convictions to have any dealings with a cabinet com- 
mitted to a policy of irrational panic, to be carried out by 
a costly war abroad and cruel repression at home. " What 
a very wretched man /" was Burke's angry exclamation one 
day, when it became certain that Fox meant to stand by 
the old flag of freedom and generous common-sense. 

When the coalition at length took place (1794), the 
only man who carried Burke's principles to their fullest 
extent into Pitt's cabinet was Windham. It is impossi- 
ble not to feel the attraction of Windham's character, his 
amiability, his reverence for great and virtuous men, his 
passion for knowledge, the versatility of his interests. He 
is a striking example of the fact that literature was a com- 
mon pursuit and occupation to the chief statesmen of that 
time (always excepting Pitt), to an extent that has been 
gradually tending to become rarer. Windham, in the 



192 BURKE. [chap. 

midst of his devotion to public affairs, to tlie business of 
his country, and, let us add, a zealous attendance on every 
prize-fight within reach, was never happy unless he was 
working up points in literature and mathematics. There ' 
was a literary and classical spirit abroad, and in spite of 
the furious preoccupations of faction a certain ready dis- 
engagement of mind prevailed. If Windham and Fox be- 
gan to talk of horses, they seemed to fall naturally into 
what had been said about horses by the old writers. Fox 
held that long ears were a merit, and Windham met him 
by the authority of Xenophon and Oppian in favour of 
short ones, and finally they went off into what it was that 
Yirgil meant, when he called a horse's head argutum 
caput. Burke and Windham travelled in Scotland to- 
gether in 1785, and their conversation fell as often on old 
books as on Hastings or on Pitt. They discussed Virgil's 
similes ; Johnson and L'Estrange, as the extremes of Eng- 
lish style ; what Stephens and A. Gellius had to say about 
Cicero's use of the word gratiosus. If they came to li- 
braries, Windham ran into them with eagerness, and very 
strongly enjoyed all *' the feel that a library usually ex- 
cites." He is constantly reproaching himself with a re- 
missness, which was purely imaginary, in keeping up his 
mathematics, his Greek tragedies, his Latin historians. 
There is no more curious example of the remorse of a 
bookman impeded by affairs. "What progress might 
men make in the several parts of knowledge," he says very 
truly, in one of these moods, " if they could only pursue 
them with the same eagerness and assiduity as are exerted 
by lawyers in the conduct of a suit." But this distrac- 
tion between the tastes of the bookman and the pursuits 
of public business, united with a certain quality of his 
constitution to produce one great defect in his character, 



ixrj WILLIAM WINDHAM. 193 

and it was the worst defect that a statesman can have. 
He became the most irresolute and vacillating* of men. 
He wastes the first half of a day in deciding which of two 
courses to take, and the second half in blaming himself 
for not having taken the other. He is constantly late at 
entertainments, because he cannot make up his mind in 
proper time whether to go or to stay at home ; hesitation 
whether he shall read in the red room or in the library, 
loses him three of the best hours of a morning; the diffi- 
culty of early rising he finds to consist less in rising early, 
than in satisfying himself that the practice is wholesome ; 
his mind is torn for a whole forenoon in an absurd con- 
test with himself, whether he ought to indulge a strong 
wish to exercise his horse before dinner. Every page of 
his diary is a register of the symptoms of this unhappy 
disease. When the Revolution came, he was absolutely 
forced by the iron necessity of the case, after certain per- 
turbations, to go either with Fox or with Burke, Under 
this compulsion he took one headlong plunge into the 
policy of alarm. Everybody knows how desperately an 
habitually irresolute man is capable of clinging to a policy 
or a conviction to which he has once been driven by dire 
stress of circumstance. AYindham having at last made up 
his mind to be frightened by the Revolution, was more 
violently and inconsolably frightened than anybody else. 

Pitt, after he had been forced into war, at least intend- 
ed it to be a war on the good old-fashioned principles of 
seizing the enemy's colonies and keeping them. He was 
taunted by the alarmists with caring only for sugar isl- 
ands, and making himself master of all the islands in the 
world except Great Britain and Ireland. To Burke all 
this was an abomination, and Windham followed Burke to 
the letter. He even declared the holy rage of the Fourth 
9* 



194 BUEKE. [chap. 

Letter on a Regicide Peace, published after Burke's deatli, 
to contain the purest wisdom and the most unanswerable 
policy. It was through Windham's eloquence and perse- 
verance that the monstrous idea of a crusade, and all 
Burke's other violent and excited precepts, gained an effec- 
tive place and hearing in the cabinet, in the royal closet, 
and in the House of Commons, long after Burke himself 
had left the scene. 

We have already seen how important an element Irish 
affairs became in the war with America. The same spirit 
which had been stirred by the American war was inevita- 
bly kindled in Ireland by the French Revolution. The 
association of United Irishmen now came into existence, 
with aims avowedly revolutionary. They joined the party 
which was striving for the relief of the Catholics from 
certain disabilities, and for their admission to the franchise. 
Burke had watched all movements in his native country, 
from the Whiteboy insurrection of 1761 downwards, with 
steady vigilance, and he watched the new movement of 
1792 with the keenest eyes. It made him profoundly 
uneasy. He could not endure the thought of ever so mo- 
mentary and indirect an association with a revolutionary 
party, either in Ireland or any other quarter of the globe, 
yet he was eager for a policy which should reconcile the 
Irish. He was so for two reasons. One of them was his 
political sense of the inexpediency of proscribing men by 
whole nations, and excluding from the franchise on the 
ground of religion a people as numerous as the subjects of 
the King of Denmark or the King of Sardinia, equal to 
the population of the United Netherlands, and larger than 
were to be found in all the States of Switzerland. His 
second reason was his sense of the urgency of facing trou- 
ble abroad with a nation united and contented at home; 



IX.] IRELAND. 195 

of abolishing in the heart of the country that "bank of 
discontent, every hour accumulating, upon which every 
description of seditious men may draw at pleasure." 

In the beginning of 1792, Burke's son went to Dublin 
as the agent and adviser of the Catholic Committee, who 
at first listened to him with the respect due to one in 
whom they expected to find the quaUties of his father. 
They soon found out that he was utterly without either 
tact or judgment; that he was arrogant, impertinent, vain, 
and empty. Wolfe Tone declared him to be by far the 
most impudent and opinionative fellow that he had ever 
known in his life. Nothing could exceed the absurdity 
of his conduct, and on one occasion he had a very narrow 
escape of being taken into custody by the Serjeant-at-arms, 
for rushing down from the gallery into the Irish House 
of Commons, and attempting to make a speech in defence 
of a petition which he had drawn up, and which was being 
attacked by a member in his place. Richard Burke went 
home, it is said, with two thousand guineas in his pocket, 
which the Catholics had cheerfully paid as the price of 
getting rid of him. He returned shortly after, but only 
helped to plunge the business into further confusion, and 
finally left the scene covered with odium and discredit. 
His father's Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) re- 
mains an admirable monument of wise statesmanship, a 
sino-ular interlude of calm and solid reasonino- in the midst 
of a fiery whirlwind of intense passion. Burke perhaps 
felt that the state of Ireland was passing away from the 
sphere of calm and solid reason, when he knew that 
Dumouriez's victory over the allies at Yalmy, which filled 
Beaconsfield with such gloom and dismay, was celebrated 
at Dublin by an illumination. 

Burke, who was now in his sixty -fourth year, had for 



196 BURKE. [chap. 

some time announced his intention of leaving the House 
of Commons, as soon as he had brought to an end the 
prosecution of Hastings. In 1794 the trial came to a 
close; the thanks of the House were formally voted to 
the managers of the impeachment; and when the scene 
was over, Burke applied for the Chiltern Hundreds. Lord 
Fitzwilliam nominated Eichard Burke for the seat which 
his father had thus vacated at Malton. Pitt was then 
making arrangements for the accession of the Portland 
Whigs to his government, and it was natural, in connexion 
with these arrangements, to confer some favour on the 
man who had done more than anybody else to promote 
the new alliance. It was proposed to make Burke a peer 
under the style of Lord Beaconsfield — a title in a later 
age whimsically borrowed for himself by a man of genius, 
who delighted in irony. To the title it was proposed to 
attach a yearly income for two or more lives. But the 
bolt of destiny was at this instant launched. Richard 
Burke, the adored centre of all his father's hopes and af- 
fections, was seized with illness, and died (August, 1794). 
We cannot look without tragic emotion on the pathos of 
the scene, which left the remnant of the old man's days 
desolate and void. A Roman poet has described in touch- 
ing words the woe of the aged Nestor, as he beheld the 
funeral pile of his son, too untimely slain — 

" Oro parumper 
Attendas quantum de legibus ipse queratur 
Fatorum et nimio de stamine, quum videt acris 
Antilochi barbam ardeutem : quum quserit ab omni 
Quisquis adest socius, cur baec in tempora duret, 
Quod facinus dignum tam longo admiserit aevo." 

Burke's grief finds a nobler expression. "The storm has 
gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which 



IX.] DEATH OF RICHARD BURKE. 19? 

the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped 
of all my honours ; I am torn up by the roots and lie pros- 
trate on the earth. ... I am alone. I have none to meet 
my enemies in the gate. ... I live in an inverted order. 
They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before 
me. They who should have been to me as posterity, are 
in the place of ancestors." 

Burke only lived three years after this desolating blow. 
The arrangements for a peerage, as a matter of course, 
came to an end. But Pitt was well aware of the serious 
embarrassments by which Burke was so pressed that he 
saw actual beggary very close at hand. The King, too — 
who had once, by the way, granted a pension to Burke's 
detested Rousseau, though Rousseau was too proud to 
draw it — seems to have been honourably interested in 
making a provision for Burke. What Pitt offered was an 
immediate grant of 1200/. a year from the Civil List for 
Mrs. Burke's life, to be followed by a proposition to Par- 
liament in a message from the King, to confer an annui- 
ty of greater value upon a statesman who had served the 
country to his own loss for thirty years. As a matter of 
fact, the grant, 2500Z. a year in amount, much to Burke's 
chagrin, was never brought before Parliament, but was con- 
ferred directly by the Crown, as a charge on a certain stock 
known as the West India four-and-a-half per cents. It 
seems as if Pitt were afraid of challenging the opinion of 
Parliament ; and the storm which the pension raised out 
of doors, was a measure of the trouble which the defence 
of it would have inflicted on the government inside the 
House of Commons. According to the rumour of the 
time, Burke sold two of his pensions upon lives for 
27,000/., and there was left the third pension of 1200/. 
for his wife's life. By and by, when the resentment of 



198 BFKKE. [chap. 

the Opposition was roused to the highest pitch by the in- 
famous Treason and Sedition Bills of 1795, the Duke of 
Bedford and Lord Lauderdale, seeking to accumulate ev- 
ery possible complaint against the government, assailed the 
grant to Burke, as made without the consent of Parlia- 
ment, and as a violent contradiction to the whole policy of 
the plan for economic reform. The attack, if not unjusti- 
fiable in itself, came from an unlucky quarter. A chief of 
the house of Bedford was the most unfit person in the 
world to protest against grants by favour of the Crown. 
Burke was too practised a rhetorician not to see the open- 
ing, and his Letter to a Nohle Lord is the most splendid 
repartee in the English language. 

It is not surprising that Burke's defence should have 
provoked rejoinder. A cloud of pamphlets followed the 
Letter to a Noble Lord — some in doggrel verse, others in 
a magniloquent prose imitated from his own, others mere 
poisonous scurrility. The nearest approach to a just stroke 
that I can find, after turning over a pile of this trash, is an 
expression of wonder that he, who was inconsolable for 
the loss of a beloved son, should not have reflected how 
many tender parents had been made childless in the pro- 
fusion of blood, of which he himself had been the most 
relentless champion. Our disgust at the pages of insult 
which were here levelled at a great man is perhaps moder- 
ated by the thought that Burke himself, who of all people 
ought to have known better, had held up to public scorn 
and obloquy men of such virtue, attainments, and real ser- 
vice to mankind as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. 

It was during these months that he composed the Let- 
ters on a Regicide Peace, though the third and fourth of 
them were not published until after his death. There 
have been those to whom these compositions appeared to 



IX.] THE REGICIDE PEACE. 199 

be Burke's masterpieces. In fact they are deplorable. 
They contain passages of fine philosophy and of skilful 
and plausible reasoning, but such passages only make us 
wonder how they come to be where they are. The reader 
is in no humour for them. In splendour of rhetoric, in 
fine images, in sustention, in irony, they surpass anything 
that Burke ever wrote ; but of the qualities and principles 
that, far more than his rhetoric, have made Burke so ad- 
mirable and so great — of justice, of firm grasp of fact, of 
a reasonable sense of the probabilities of things — there are 
only traces enough to light up the gulfs of empty words, 
reckless phrases, and senseless vituperations, that surge and 
boil around them. 

It is with the same emotion of " grief and shame " with 
which Fox heard Burke argue against relief to Dissenters, 
that we hear him abusing the courts of law because they 
did not convict Hardy and Home Tooke. The pages 
against divorce and civil marriage, even granting that they 
point to the right judgment in these matters, express it 
with a vehemence that is irrational, and in the dialect, not 
of a statesman, but of an enraged Capucin. The highly- 
wrought passage in which Burke describes external aggran- 
disement as the original thought and the ultimate aim of 
the earlier statesmen of the Revolution, is no better than 
ingenious nonsense. The whole performance rests on a 
gross and inexcusable anachronism. There is a contempt- 
uous refusal to discriminate between groups of men who 
were as different from one another as Oliver Cromwell was 
different from James Nayler, and between periods which 
were as unlike in all their conditions as the Athens of the 
Thirty Tyrants was unlike Athens after Thrasybulus had 
driven the Tyrants out. He assumes that the men, the 
policy, the maxims of the French government are the men, 



200 BURKE. [chap. 

the policy, and the maxims of the handful of obscure mis- 
creants who had hacked priests and nobles to pieces at the 
doors of the prisons four years before. Carnot is to him 
merely "that sanguinary tyrant," and the heroic Hoche 
becomes " that old practised assassin," while the Prince of 
Wales, by the way, and the Duke of York are the hope 
and pride of nations. To heap up that incessant iteration 
about thieves, murderers, housebreakers, assassins, bandits, 
bravoes with their hands dripping with blood and their 
maw gorged with property, desperate paramours, bombas- 
tical players, the refuse and rejected offal of strolling the- 
atres, bloody buffoons, bloody felons— all this was as un- 
just to hundreds of disinterested, honest, and patriotic men 
who were then earnestly striving to restore a true order 
and solid citizenship in France, as the foul-mouthed scur- 
rility of an Irish Orangeman is unjust to millions of de- 
vout Catholics. 

Burke was the man who might have been expected be- 
fore all others to know that in every system of govern- 
ment, whatever may have been the crimes of its origin, 
there is sure, by the bare necessity of things, to rise up a 
party or an individual, whom their political instinct will 
force into resistance to the fatalities of anarchy. Man is 
too strongly a political animal for it to be otherwise. It 
was so at each period and division in the Revolution. There 
was always a party of order; and by 1796, when Burke 
penned these reckless philippics, order was only too easy 
in France. The Revolution had worn out the passion and 
moral enthusiasm of its first years, and all the best men of 
the revolutionary time had been consumed in a flame of 
fire. When Burke talked about this war being wholly un- 
like any war that ever was waged in Europe before, about 
its being a war for justice on the one side, and a fanatical 



IX.] THE REGICIDE PEACE. 201 

bloody propagandism on the other, he shut his eyes to 
the plain fact that the Directory had after all really sunk 
to the moral level of Frederick and Catharine, or, for that 
matter, of Louis the Fourteenth himself. This war was 
only too like the other great wars of European history. 
The French government had become political, exactly in 
the same sense in which Thugut and Metternich and Herz- 
berg were political. The French Republic in 1797 was 
neither more nor less aggressive, immoral, piratical, than 
the monarchies which had partitioned Poland, and had in- 
tended to redistribute the continent of Europe to suit their 
own ambitions. The Coalition began the game, but France 
proved too strong for them, and they had the worst of their 
game. Jacobinism may have inspired the original j5re which 
made her armies irresistible, but Jacobinism of that stamp 
had now gone out of fashion, and to denounce a peace with 
the Directory because the origin of their government was 
regicidal, was as childish as it would have been in Mazarin 
to decline a treaty of regicide peace with Oliver Cromwell. 
What makes the Regicide Peace so repulsive is not that 
it recommends energetic prosecution of the war, and not 
that it abounds in glaring fallacies in detail, but that it is 
in direct contradiction with that strong, positive, ration- 
al, and sane method which had before uniformly marked 
Burke's political philosophy. Here lay his inconsistency, 
not in abandoning democratic principles, for he had never 
held them, but in forgetting his own rules, that nations act 
from adequate motives relative to their interests, and not 
from metaphysical speculation; that we cannot draw an 
indictment against a whole people, that there is a species 
of hostile justice which no asperity of war wholly extin- 
guishes in the minds of a civilized people. *' Steady in- 
dependent minds " he had once said, " when they have an 



202 BURKE. [chap. 

object of so serious a concern to mankind as government 
under tlieir contemplation, will disdain to assume the part 
of satirists and declaimers." Show the thing that you ask 
for, he cried during the American war, to be reason, show 
it to be common-sense. We have a measure of the rea- 
son and common-sense of Burke's attitude in the Regicide 
Peace, in the language which it inspired in Windham and 
others, who denounce Wilberforce for canting when he 
spoke of peace ; who stigmatized Pitt as weak, and a pan- 
der to national avarice for thinking of the cost of the war ; 
and who actually charged the liverymen of London who 
petitioned for peace, with open sedition. 

It is a striking illustration of the versatility of Burke's 
moods, that immediately before sitting down to write the 
flaming Letters on a Regicide Peace, he had composed one 
of the most lucid and accurately meditated of all his tracts, 
which, short as it is, contains ideas on free trade which 
was only too far in advance of the opinion of his time. 
In 1772 a Corn Bill had been introduced — it was passed 
in the following year — of which Adam Smith said, that 
it was like the laws of Solon, not the best in itself, but 
the best which the situation and tendency of the times 
would admit. In speaking upon this measure, Burke had 
laid down those sensible principles on the trade in corn, 
which he now in 1795 worked out in the Thoughts and 
Details on Scarcity. Those who do not concern them- 
selves with economics will perhaps be interested in the 
singular passage, vigorously objected to by Dugald Stew- 
art, in which Burke sets up a genial defence of the con- 
sumption of ardent spirits. It is interesting as an argu- 
ment, and it is most characteristic of the author. 

The curtain was now falling. All who saw him, felt 
that Burke's life was quickly drawing to a close. His 



IX.] VISIT TO BEACONSFIELD. 203 

son's death Lad struck the final blow. We could only 
wish that the years had brought to him, what it ought to 
be the fervent prayer of us all to find at the close of the 
long struggle with ourselves and with circumstance — a 
disposition to happiness, a composed spirit to which time 
has made things clear, an unrebellious temper, and hopes 
undimmed for mankind. If this was not so, Burke at 
least busied himself to the end in great interests. His 
charity to the unfortunate emigrants from France was dil- 
igent and unwearied. Among other solid services, he es- 
tablished a school at Beaconsfield for sixty French boys, 
principally the orphans of Quiberon, and the children of 
other emigrants who had suffered in the cause. Almost 
the last glimpse that we have of Burke is in a record of 
a visit to Beaconsfield by the author of the Vindicice Gal- 
licce. Mackintosh had written to Burke to express his ad- 
miration for his character and genius, and recanting his old 
defence of the Revolution. " Since that time," he said, " a 
melancholy experience has undeceived me on many sub- 
jects, in which I was then the dupe of my enthusiasm." 
When Mackintosh went to Beaconsfield (Christmas, 1V97), 
he was as much amazed as every one else with the exuber- 
ance of his host's mind in conversation. Even then Burke 
entered with cordial glee into the sports of children, roll- 
ing about with them on the carpet, and pouring out in 
his gambols the sublimest images, mixed with the most 
wretched puns. He said of Fox, with a deep sigh, " He 
is made to be loved." There was the irresistible outbreak 
against "that putrid carcase, that mother of all evil — the 
French Revolution." It reminded him of the accursed 
things that crawled in and out of the mouth of the vile 
hag in Spenser's Cave of Error ; and he repeated the nau- 
seous stanza. Mackintosh was to be the faithful knight 



204 BURKE. [chap. ix. 

of the romance, the brightness of whose sword was to flash 
destruction on the filthy progeny. 

It was on the 9th of July, 1797, that in the sixty-eighth 
year of his age, preserving his faculties to the last moment, 
he expired. With magnanimous tenderness, Fox proposed 
that he should be buried among the great dead in West- 
minster Abbey ; but Burke had left strict injunctions that 
his funeral should be private, and he was laid in the little 
church at Beaconsfield. It was a terrible moment in the 
history of England and of Europe. An open mutiny had 
just been quelled in the fleet. There had been signs of 
disaffection in the army. In Ireland the spirit of revolt 
was smouldering, which in a few months broke out in the 
fierce flames of a great rebellion. And it was the year of 
the political crime of Campo Formio, that sinister pacifi- 
cation in which violence and fraud once more asserted their 
unveiled ascendancy in Europe. These sombre shadows 
were falling over the western world, when a life went out, 
which, notwithstanding some grave aberrations, had made 
great tides in human destiny very luminous. 



CHAPTER X. 

burke's literary character. 

A STORY is told that in the time when Burke was still at 
peace with the Dissenters, he visited Priestley, and after 
seeing his library and his laboratory, and hearing how his 
host's hours were given to experiment and meditation, he 
exclaimed that such a life must make him the happiest 
and most to be envied of men. It must sometimes have 
occurred to Burke to wonder whether he had made the 
right choice when he locked away the fragments of his 
history, and plunged into the torment of party and Par- 
liament. But his interests and aptitudes were too strong 
and overmastering for him to have been right in doing 
otherwise. Contact with affairs was an indispensable con- 
dition for the full use of his great faculties, in spite of 
their being less faculties of affairs than of speculation. 
Public life was the actual field in which to test, and work 
out, and use with good effect the moral ideas which were 
Burke's most sincere and genuine interests. And he was 
able to bring these moral ideas into such effective use 
because he was so entirely unfettered by the narrowing 
spirit of formula. No man, for instance, who thought in 
formulae would have written the curious passage that I 
have already referred to, in which he eulogises gin, because 
" under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mor- 
tal condition, men have at all times and in all countries 



206 BUKKE. [chap. 

called in some physical aid to tlieir moral consolation." 
He valued words at tlieir proper rate ; that is to say, he 
knew that some of the greatest facts in the life and char- 
acter of man, and in the institutions of society, can find 
no description and no measurement in words. Public life, 
as we can easily perceive, with its shibboleths, its exclu- 
sive parties, its measurement by conventional standards, its 
attention to small expediencies before the larger ones, is 
not a field where such characteristics are likely to make 
an instant effect. 

Though it is not wrong to say of Burke that, as an ora- 
tor, he was transcendent, yet in that immediate influence 
upon his hearers which is commonly supposed to be the 
mark of oratorical success, all the evidence is that Burke 
generally failed. We have seen how his speech against 
Hastings affected Miss Burney, and how the speech on 
the Nabob of Arcot's debts w^as judged by Pitt not to be 
worth answering. Perhaps the greatest that he ever made ^ 
was that on conciliation with America; the wisest in its j 
temper, the most closely logical in its reasoning, the am- 
plest in appropriate topics, the most generous and concili- 
atory in the substance of its appeals. Yet Erskine, who \ 
was in the House when this was delivered, said that it ^ 
drove everybody away, including people who, when they 
came to read it, read it over and over again, and could 
hardly think of anything else. As Moore says rather too 
floridly, but with truth — " In vain did Burke's genius put 
forth its superb plumage, glittering all over with the hun- 
dred eyes of fancy — the gait of the bird was heavy and 
awkward, and its voice seemed rather to scare than attract." 
Burke's gestures were clumsy ; he had sonorous but harsh 
tones ; he never lost a strong Irish accent ; and his utter- 
ance was often hurried and eager. Apart from these dis- 



X.] AS AN ORATOR. 207 

advantages of accident which have been overcome by men 
infinitely inferior to Burke, it is easy to perceive, from the 
matter and texture of the speeches that have become Eng- 
lish classics, that the very qualities which are excellences 
in literature were drawbacks to the spoken discourses. A 
listener in Westminster Hall or the House of Commons, 
unlike the reader by his fireside in the next century, is al- 
ways thinking of arguments and facts that bear directly 
on the special issue before him. What he wishes to hear 
is some particularity of event or inference which will ei- 
ther help him to make up his mind, or will justify him if 
his mind is already made up. Burke never neglected these 
particularities, and he never w^ent so wide as to fall for an 
instant into vagueness, but he went wide enough into the 
generalities that lent force and light to his view, to weary 
men who cared for nothing, and could not be expected to 
care for anything, but the business actually in hand and 
the most expeditious way through it. The contentious- 
ness is not close enough and rapid enough to hold the in- 
terest of a practical assembly, which, though it was a hun- 
dred times less busy than the House of Commons to-day, 
seems to have been eager in the inverse proportion of what 
it had to do, to get that little quickly done. 

Then we may doubt whether there is any instance of 
an orator throwing his spell over a large audience, without 
frequent resort to the higher forms of commonplace. Two 
of the greatest speeches of Burke's time are supposed to 
have been Grattan's on Tithes and Fox's on the Westmin- 
ster Scrutiny, and these were evidently full of the splendid 
commonplaces of the first-rate rhetorician. Burke's mind 
was not readily set to these tunes. The emotion to which 
he commonly appealed was that too rare one, the love of 
wisdom ; and he combined his thoughts and knowledge in 



208 BURKE. [chap. 

propositions of wisdom so weighty and strong, that the 
minds of ordinary hearers were not on the instant pre- 
pared for them. 

It is true that Burke's speeches were not without effect 
of an indirect kind, for there is good evidence that at the 
time when Lord North's ministry was tottering, Burke had 
risen to a position of the first eminence in Parliament. 
When Boswell said to him that people would wonder how 
he could bring himself to take so mucli pains with his 
speeches, knowing with certainty that not one vote would 
be gained by them, Burke answered that it is very well 
worth while to take pains to speak well in Parliament; 
for if a man speaks well, he gradually establishes a certain 
reputation and consequence in the general opinion ; and 
though an Act that has been ably opposed becomes law, 
yet in its progress it is softened and modified to meet ob- 
jections whose force has never been acknowledged directly. 
" Aye, sir," Johnson broke in, " and there is a gratification 
of pride. Though we cannot out-vote them, we will out- 
argue them." 

Out-arguing is not perhaps the right word for most of 
Burke's performances. He is at heart thinking more of 
the subject itself than of those on whom it was his appar- 
ent business to impress a particular view of it. He sur- 
renders himself wholly to the matter, and follows up, 
though with a strong and close tread, all the excursions to 
which it may give rise in an elastic intelligence — "mo- 
tion," as De Quincey says, " propagating motion, and life 
throwing off life." But then this exuberant way of think- 
ing, this willingness to let the subject lead, is less apt 
in public discourse than it is in literature, and from this 
comes the literary quality of Burke's speeches. 

With all his hatred for the book-man in politics, Burke 



X.] AS A WRITER. 209 

owed mucli of his own distinction to that generous rich- 
ness and breadth of judgment which had been ripened in 
him by literature and his practice in it. Like some other 
men in our histor}^ he showed that books are a better 
preparation for statesmanship than early training in the 
subordinate posts and among the permanent officials of a 
public department. There is no copiousness of literary 
reference in his works, such as over-abounded in civil and 
ecclesiastical publicists of the seventeenth century. Nor 
can we truly say that there is much, though there is cer- 
tainly some, of that tact which literature is alleged to con- 
fer on those who approach it in a just spirit and with the 
true gift. The influence of literature on Burke lay partly 
in the direction of emancipation from the mechanical for- 
mula? of practical politics ; partly in the association which 
it engendered, in a powerful understanding like his, be- 
tween politics and the moral forces of the world, and be- 
tween political maxims and the old and great sentences of 
morals; partly in drawing him, even when resting his case 
on prudence and expediency, to appeal to the widest and 
highest sympathies ; partly, and more than all, in opening 
his thoughts to the many conditions, possibilities, and " va- 
rieties of untried being " in human character and situation, 
and so giving an incomparable flexibiUty to his methods 
of political approach. 

This flexibility is not to be found in his manner and 
composition. That derives its immense power from other 
sources ; from passion, intensity, imagination, size, truth, 
cogency of logical reason. If any one has imbued himself 
^\iih that exacting love of delicacy, measure, and taste in 
expression, which was until our own day a sacred tradition 
of the French, then he will not like Burke. Those who in- 
sist on charm, on winningness in style, on subtle harmonies 
10 



210 BURKE. [chap. 

and exquisite suggestion, are disappointed in Burke ; they 
even find him stiff and over-coloured. And there are 
blemishes of this kind. His banter is nearly always un- 
gainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said of it, and very often 
unseasonable. We feel that Johnson must have been right 
in declaring that though Burke w^as always in search of 
pleasantries, he never made a good joke in his life. As is 
usual with a man who has not true humour, Burke is also 
without true pathos. The thought of wrong or misery 
moved him less to pity for the victim than to anger against 
the cause. Again, there are some gratuitous and unre- 
deemed vulo'arities : some imao*es whose barbaritv makes 
us shudder, of creeping ascarides and inexpugnable tape- 
worms. But it is the mere foppery of literature to suffer 
ourselves to be long detained by specks like these. 

The varieties of Burke's literary or rhetorical method 
are very striking. It is almost incredible that the superb 
imaginative amplification of the description of Hyder All's 
descent upon the Carnatic should be from the same pen as 
the grave, simple, unadorned Address to the King (1777), 
where each sentence falls on the ear with the accent of 
some golden-tongued oracle of the wise gods. His stride 
is the stride of a giant, from the sentimental beauty of the 
picture of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, or the red horror 
of the tale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning, pos- 
itiveness, and cool judicial mastery of the Report on the 
Lords^ Journals (1794), which Philip Francis, no mean 
judge, declared on the whole to be the " most eminent and 
extraordinary " of all his productions. Even in the cool- 
est and dryest of his pieces there is the mark of greatness, 
of grasp, of comprehension. In all its varieties Burke's 
style is noble, earnest, deep-flowing, because his sentiment 
was lofty and fervid, and went with sincerity and ardent 



x] HIS STYLE. 211 

disciplined travail of judgment. Fox told Francis Horner 
that Dryden's prose was Burke's great favourite, and that 
Burke imitated him more than anyone else. We may 
well believe that he was attracted by Dryden's ease, his 
copiousness, his gaiety, his manliness of style, but there 
can hardly have been any conscious attempt at imitation. 
Their topics were too different. Burke had the style of 
his subjects, the amplitude, the weightiness, the laborious- 
ness, the sense, the high flight, the grandeur, proper to a 
man dealing with imperial themes, the freedom of nations, 
the justice of rulers, the fortunes of great societies, the sa- 
credness of law. Burke will always be read with delight 
and edification, because in the midst of discussions on the 
local and the accidental, he scatters apophthegms that take 
us into the reo-ions of lastino' wisdom. In the midst of the 
torrent of his most strenuous and passionate deliverances, 
he suddenly rises aloof from his immediate subject, and in 
all tranquillity reminds us of some permanent relation of 
things, some enduring truth of human life or society. We 
do not hear the organ tones of Milton, for faith and free- 
dom had other notes in the seventeenth century. There 
is none of the complacent and wise -browed sagacity of 
Bacon, for Burke's were days of eager personal strife and 
party fire and civil division. We are not exhilarated by 
the cheerfulness, the polish, the fine manners of Boling- 
broke, for Burke had an anxious conscience, and was ear- 
nest and intent that the good should triumph. And yet 
Burke is among the greatest of those who have wrought 
marvels in the prose of our English tongue. 

The inflnence of Burke on the publicists of the genera- 
tion after the Revolution was much less considerable than 
might have been expected. In Germany, where there has 
been so much excellent writing about Staatswiss'enscliaft, 



213 BURKE. [chap. 

with sucli poverty and darkness in the wisdom of practi- 
cal pohtics, there is a long list of writers who have drawn 
their inspiration from Burke. In France, publicists of the 
sentimental school, like Chateaubriand, and the politico- 
ecclesiastical school, like De Maistre, fashioned a track of 
their own. In England Burke made a deep mark on con- 
temporary opinion during the last years of his life, and 
then his influence underwent a certain eclipse. The offi- 
cial Whigs considered him a renegade and a heresiarch, 
who had committed the deadly sin of breaking up the 
party, and they never mentioned his name without bitter- 
ness. To men like Godwin, the author of Political Jus- 
tice, Burke was as antichrist. Bentham and James Mill 
thought of him as a declaimer who lived upon applause, 
and who, as one of them says, was for protecting every- 
thing old, not because it was good but because it existed. 
In one quarter only did he exert a profound influence. 
His maxim that men might employ their sagacity in dis- 
covering the latent wisdom which underlies general preju- 
dices and old institutions, instead of exploding them, in- 
spired Coleridge, as I have already said ; and the Coleridg- 
ian school are Burke's direct descendants, whenever they 
deal with the significance and the relations of Church and 
State. But they connected these views so closely with 
their views in metaphysics and theology, that the associa- 
tion with Burke was effectually disguised. 

The only English writer of that age whom we can name 
along with Burke in the literature of enduring power, is 
Wordsworth, that great representative in another and a 
higher field, and with many rare elements added that were 
all his own, of those harmonizing and conciliatory forces 
and ideas that make man's destiny easier to him through 
piety in* its oldest and best sense; through reverence for 



X.] HIS INFLUENCE. 213 

tlie past, for duty, for institutioiis. He was born in the 
year of the Present Discontents (l770) ; and when Burke 
wrote the Reflections, Wordsworth was standing, with 
France *' on the top of golden hours," listening with de- 
lio'ht amonij the ruins of the Bastille, or on the banks of 
the Loire, to "the homeless sound of joy that was in the 
sky." When France lost faith and freedom, and Napoleon 
had built his throne on their grave, he began to see those 
stronof elements which for Burke had all his life been the 
true and fast foundation of the social world. Wide as is 
the difference between an oratorical and a declamatory 
mind like Burke's, and the least oratorical of all poets, yet, 
under this difference of form and temper, there is a strik- 
ing likeness in spirit. There was the same energetic feel- 
ing about moral ideas, the same frame of counsel and 
prudence, the same love for the slowness of time, the same 
slight account held of mere intellectual knowledge, and 
even the same ruling sympathy with that side of the char- 
acter of Englishmen which Burke exulted in, as " their aive 
ofkings and reverence for priests,'''' " their sullen resistance 
of innovation,'''' " their unalterable perseverance in the wis- 
dom of prejudice.'''' 

The conservative movement in England ran on for many 
years in the ecclesiastical channel, rather than among ques- 
tions where Burke's writings might have been brought to 
bear. On the political side the most active minds, both 
in practice and theory, w^orked out the principles of liber- 
alism, and they did so on a plan and by methods from 
which Burke's utilitarian liberalism and his historic con- 
servatism were equally remote. . There are many signs 
around us that this epoch is for the. .moment at an end. 
The historic method, fitting in with certain dominant con- 
ceptions in the region of natural science, is bringing men 



214 BUKKE. [chap. x. 

round to*a way of looking at society for whicli Burke's 
maxims are exactly suited ; and it seems probable that 
he will be more frequently and more seriously referred to 
within the next twenty years than he has been within the 
whole of the last eighty. 



THE END. 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. 

EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY. 



These short Books are addressed to the general public, with a view both 
to stirring and satisfying an interest in literature and its great topics in the 
minds of those who have to run as they read. Au immense class is growing 
up, and must every year increase, whose education will have made them 
alive to the importance of the masters of our literature, and capable of in- 
telligent curiosity as to their performances. The series is intended to give 
the means of nourishing this curiosity to an extent that shall be copious 
enough to be profitable for knowledge and life, and yet be brief enough to 
serve those whose leisure is scanty. The following volumes are now ready: 

JOHNSON Leslie Stepiieij. 

GIBBON J. C. MoKisoN. 

SCOTT R. H. HuTTON, 

SHELLEY J. A. Symonds. 

HUME Professor Huxley. 

GOJiDSMITH William Black. 

DE'fOE William Minto. 

BURNS Principal Shairp. 

SPENSER The Dean of St. Paul's. 

THACKERAY Anthony Tuollope. 

BURKE JOUN MOKLEY. 

12mo, Cloth, 75 cents a volume. 

VOLUMES IN PREPARATION: 

BUNYAN J. A. Fkotidr. 

MILTON Makk Pattison. 

WORDSWORTH F. Myeus. 

SWIFT. John Morley. 

BYRON Professor Niohol. 

CHAUCER Professor A. W. WAfti>. 

HAWTHORNE. Henky James, Jr. 

GRAY John Morley. 

ADAM SMITH Leonard H. Courtney. 

COWPER GoLDWiN Smith. 

POPE Leslie Stephen. 

SOUTHEY Professor Dowden. 

LANDOR Professor Sidney Colvin. 

BENTLEY Professor Jebu. 

Others will be announced. 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 



A NEW LIBRARY EDITION 

OF 

MACAULAY'S ENGLAND. 

MACATJLAY'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. New Edi- 
tion, from New Electrotype Plates. 5 volumes, 8vo, 
Yellum Cloth with. Paper Labels, Gilt Tops and Un- 
cut Edges, $10 00. Sold only in Sets. 

The beauty of the edition is the beauty of proper workmauship 
and solid worth — the beauty of fitness alone. Nowhere is the least 
effort made to decorate the volumes externally or internally. They 
are perfectly printed from new plates that have been made in the 
best manner, and with the most accurate understanding of what is 
needed; and they are solidly bound, with absolutely plain black 
cloth covers, without relief of any kind, except such as is afforded 
by the paper label. It is a set of plain, solid, sensible volumes, 
made for use, and so made as to be comfortable in the using. — 
N. Y. Evening Post. 



OTHER EDITIONS OF MACAULAY'S ENGLAND; 

Library Edition : 5 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $10 00. 
Popular Edition: 5 vols., 12rao, Cloth, $4 00. 
CftEAP Edition : 5 vols., 8vo, Paper, $1 50. 

The volumes are sold separately. 



Published by HAEPER & BEOTHEES, New York. 

Sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States^ 
on receipt of the price. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 



POETICAL WORKS OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 

With a Biographical Memoir, and Notes on the Poems. Edited 
by Bolton Corney. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $3 00 ; Cloth, Gilt 
Edges, $3 15 ; Turkey Morocco, Gilt Edges, $1 50. 

SELECT POEMS OF OLIVER GOLDSMITPL 

Edited, with Notes, by William J. Rolfe, A.M. Illustrated. 
Small 4to, Flexible Cloth, '70 cents ; Paper, 50 cents. 

GOLDSMITH'S POEMS. 

32mo, Paper, 25 cents ; Cloth, 40 cents. 

GOLDSMITH'S PLAYS. 

32mo, Paper, 20 cents ; Cloth, 35 cents. 

THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. 

By Oliver Goldsmith. 18mo, Cloth, 50 cents. 32rao, Paper, 
25 cents ; Cloth, 40 cents. 

GOLDSMITH. By William Black. 

Goldsmith. By William Black. A Critical and Biographical 
Sketch. (In the series entitled "English Men of Letters.") 
12mo, Cloth, 75 cents. 

GOLDSMITH.— BUNYAN.— MADAME D'ARBLAY. 

By Lord Macaulat. 32rao, Paper, 25 cents ; Cloth, 40 cents. 

HISTORY OF GREECE. 

By Oliver Goldsmith. Abridged by the Author. 18mo, Cloth, 
75 cents. 

HISTORY OF ROME. 

By Oliver Goldsmith. Abridged by the Author. ISmo, Cloth. 
75 cents. 

OLIVER GOLDSMITH. By Washington Irving. 

Life of Oliver Goldsmith. With Selections from his Writings. 
By Washington Irving. 2 vols., 18mo, Cloth, f 1 50. 



Publishea by HAEPEE & BEOTHEES, New York. 

Any of the above toorks ivill hs sent by mail, postage prepaid^ to any part 
of the United States, on receijit of the price. 



MOTLEY'S HISTORIES. 

CHEAP EDITION. 

THE EISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC. A History. By John 
LoTHROP Motley, LL.D., D.C.L. With a Portrait of William of 
Orange. 3 volumes, 8vo, Yellum Cloth with Paper Labels, Uncut 
Edges and Gilt Tops, |6 00. Sold only in Sets, 

HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS: from the Death 
of William the Silent to the Twelve- Years' Truce. With a full 
Yiew of the English-Dutch Struggle against Spain, and of the 
Origin and Destruction of the Spanish Armada. By John 
LoTHROP Motley, LL.D., D.C.L. With Portraits. 4 volumes, 
8vo, Yellum Cloth with Paper Labels, Uncut Edges and Gilt 
Tops, $8 00. Sold only in Sets. 

LIFE AND DEATH OF JOHN OF BARNEYELD, Advocate of 
Holland. With a Yiew of the Primary Causes and Movements 
of the " Thirty- Years' War." By John Lothrop Motley, LL.D., 
D.C.L. Illustrated. 2 volumes, 8vo, Yellum Cloth with Paper 
Labels, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $4 00. Sold only in Sets. 



This editiou of Motley's "Complete Historical Works" affords an oppor- 
tnnity to the collectoi- of choice standard works to fill a possible vacancy in 
his library at a moderate cost. The reader of Motley always returns to the 
l)erusal of his writings with a zest which may be compared to the taste of 
the ripe strawberries in early June. The freshness of his mind never fails 
to give a flavor to his narrative. His descriptions read less like a recital of 
the faded past than a vivid picture of living scenes. No historian transports 
so much of himself into his Avritings ; and though without the faintest trace 
of egotism, they are always intensely human and individual.— ^^. Y. Tribune. 



The original Library Edition, on larger paper, of Mr. Motley's 
Histories can still be supplied: "The Dutch Republic," 3 vols.; 
*' The History of the United Netherlands," 4 vols. ; " Life and Death 
of John of Barneveld," 2 vols. Price per volume, in Cloth, $3 50 ; 
in Sheep, $4 00 ; in Half Calf or Half Morocco, $5 75. The volumes 
of this original edition sold separately. 



PubHsted by HAEPES & BEOTHERS, New York. 

^W Sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, 
on receipt of the price. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



BOSWELL'S JOHNSON. 

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Including a Journal of a 
Tour to the Hebrides. By James Boswell, Esq. Portrait of 
Boswell. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $4 00; Sheep, $5 00; Half Calf, 

$8 50. 

JOHNSON'S WORKS. 

The Complete Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. With an Essay 
on his Life and Genius, by Arthur Murphy, Esq. 2 vols,, 8vo, 
Cloth, $4 00 ; Sheep, $5 00 ; Half Calf, $8 50. 

SAMUEL JOHNSON. By Leslie Stephen. 

Samuel Johnson. By Leslie Stephen. A Critical and Biographi- 
cal Sketch. (In the series entitled " English Men of Letters.") 
12mo, Cloth, 15 cents. 

JOHNSON'S LIFE AND WRITINGS. 

Selected and Arranged by the Rev. William P. Page. 2 vols,, 

18mo, Cloth, $1 50. 

JOHNSON. By Lord Macaulay. 

Samuel Johnson, LL.D. By Lord Macaulay. 32mo, Paper, 
25 cents. 

JOHNSON'S RELIGIOUS LIFE. 

The Religious Life and Death of Dr. Johnson. 12mo, Cloth, 

$1 50. 

SAMUEL JOHNSON. By E. T. Mason. 

Samuel Johnson : His Words and his Ways ; What he Said, 
What he Did, and What Men Thought and Spoke Concerning 
Him. Edited by E. T. Mason. 12mo, Cloth, $1 50. 



Publislied by HARPEK & BROTEEES, ISew York. 

Amj of the above works icill he sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part 
^ the United States, on receipt of the 2)rice. 



BISTORT OF TIE ENGUSH PEOPLE. 



By JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A., 

AtJTnoK OF "A Shout Histoky of the English People," "Stray Studies 

FKOM EnQLANU and ItALY." 



In Five Volumes. 8yo^ Cloth, $2 50 per volume. 

Volumes I., II., and III. noiv readi/. 



Mr. Green has clone a "work whicli probably no one bnt himself could 
have done. He has read and assimilated the results of all the labors of 
students during the last half century in the field of English history, and has 
given them a fresh meaning by his own independent study. He has fused 
together by the force of sympathetic imagination all that he has so collected, 
and has given us a vivid and forcible sketch of the march of English histor}'. 
His book, both in its aims and in its accomplishment, rises far beyond any 
of a similar kind, and it will give the coloring to the popular view of English 
history for some time to come. — Examiner, Loudon. 

Mr. Green nowhere writes anything to fill space; he never multiplies 
words ; he uses every line of the added space for the presentation of matters 
that greatly need to be included; he has packed every inch full, and the 
larger work impresses the reader as still singularly compact and free from 
prolixity. It is still, in its expanded form, a model of conciseness, direct- 
ness, and simplicity. — N. Y. Evening Post. 

To speak of Mr. Green's merits as a historian is by this time a work of 
supererogation. They have already been amply recognized in all quarters. 
— Saturday Review, London. 

Although we have a multitude of English histories, we have hitherto had 
no adequate history of England. Of course, there have been summaries 
and compends; but none that wns at once broad, comprehensive, phil- 
osophical, and complete. * * * Mr. Green's descriptions of battles are very 
brief; his accounts of the great movements which have left their impress on 
all subsequent time are full. He is more concerned to trace the progress 
of the nation than to give an account of the prowess of single individuals. 
He is a man of liberal ideas and of a progressive spirit, but writes with 
singular impartiality.— C'/irisimn Union, N. Y. 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

^° Harper & Brothers ivill send the above work by mail, postage 
prepaid, to any part of the United States, on receipt of the price. 



YC 



JUN 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



020 680 608 4 



